Jennifer McRae gazes out of the painting that won her this year’s Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize. Titled Past, Present, Future: Tracing the Female Line, it depicts her at work, painting a portrait of her daughter and granddaughter – three generations on one canvas. She looks intense, focused, her brush poised.
Besides being a meditation on motherhood, the piece gives a fascinating insight into an artist at work. The portraits of her daughter and granddaughter are incomplete, layers of colour and detail still to be added, and in the foreground sits a glorious mess of paintbrushes and half-squeezed tubes of oil paint: Old Holland, Charvin and Schmincke, brands she chooses, she says, for their texture and purity of colour.
“The idea for this painting had been with me a for couple of…
