Prudence Flint Baby

‘Urszula Dawkins, who is not a mother, has been my closest friend for 30 years,’ says Prudence Flint.

‘When we first met she was a singer in a band. She began writing fiction in the nineties and has become a frequent lone traveller to Arctic Europe. We have supported each other in our unconventional life choices, balancing the demands of our creative lives and questioning social expectations.

‘The idea for the work came after seeing the late Gothic paintings of the Madonna and child in the Musée de Petit Palais, Avignon. I related to the ambivalence and the unnerving fierceness in the gestures between the mother and child,’ says Flint.

‘I wanted to paint Urszula with baby to show how the presence of motherhood is in our lives, whatever choices we make, like a parallel world. The painting began as a tiny sketch and I tried to keep it true to the tension between the monstrous and the tender. It felt like a delicate radiation area between beauty and repulsion that was tricky to paint.’

Flint was a finalist in the 2006 and 2013 Archibald Prize and the 2013 Sulman Prize. She won the 2009 Portia Geach Memorial Award and the 2004 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. She exhibits in Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart.