The $75,000 first prize in the nation’s newest portrait award, the prestigious Darling Portrait Prize, has gone to painter and book illustrator Jaq Grantford – and all it took was a little creative visualisation.

“I said to myself, I’d like to have a work hanging in the National Portrait Gallery one day,” she says.

There was evidently power in those words – Grantford on Friday won the Darling with a technically brilliant self-portrait, combining whimsy with emotional depth.

“It’s definitely a lockdown portrait,” says Grantford, who is based in the Melbourne suburb of Carrum Downs. “My feelings during lockdown were very conflicted. There were things that we didn’t think could possibly ever happen like not being able to travel interstate or drive further than five kilometres. But then there was this guilty pleasure of the noise stopping around me and the pleasure of going into the studio. It was just me in my space – I’m an extroverted introvert.”

The winning work shows Grantford with her fingers interlaced across the lower half of her face and with paintbrushes emerging at odd angles from her untamed blonde hair. Over her 30-year career she has developed the habit of tucking brushes in her hair and behind her ears as she works.

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However, it’s a habit she was forced temporarily to suspend after undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.

“Six months ago, I was completely bald,” she says. “I’m looking at this painting, with all this hair just going, ‘Who is this woman?’”

The Darling Prize is named for Gordon Darling, one of the founding patrons of Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery. Its first year was 2020 and this is only the second time it has been awarded due to COVID interruptions. Darling’s wife Marilyn Darling, also a founding patron and former chair of the gallery, on hand to announce this year’s winner, was impressed by the 39 finalists, including luminaries Wendy Sharpe and Jiawei Shen.