“I thought maybe there was something wrong with my title or something,” she said. “I called them back and I was very shocked. I was just in a state of disbelief for a good five minutes.”
Her winning entry took two months of painstaking work to complete, employing her favourite medium of coloured pencils. She had worked in oils but starting getting “freaked out” about the fumes, before making the switch to pencils.
“Drawing is my main passion,” she said. “And using the coloured pencils allows me to play with colour.”
NAS director Kristen Sharp, who joined the school two months ago, said she was blown away by the diversity among the 965 entries.
“A lot of works have really strong technical capacity and skill and great sensitivity to some materials, but then others are completely conceptually expansive, too,” she said. “You get that real sense that drawing is a big field of practice.”
Lee joins an impressive list of past Dobell winners, including Garry Shead, Nicholas Harding and Euan Macleod.
