Artists Steven Rendall and Ella Dunn are joint winners of the Bayside Painting Prize’s $25,000 major award for their works Myriad reflector IV (2025) by Rendall and Dunn’s Small town gossip (2024). Rendall and Dunn were selected from a group of 47 finalists drawn from over 600 entries across Australia.
The winners’ works, so different in scope and design, show the variety of subject matters on offer.
“Myriad reflector IV is part of a large series of paintings based on a deliberately capricious image selection process. I’m discovering patterns as I accumulate the paintings. Sometimes an image is repeated because I find them interesting – there are four other mirror ball paintings,” Rendall tells ArtsHub.
His creativity spans painting, sculpture and video. “My practice is catalysed by the strange resonances between painting as a method and other ways of making images (and why people choose what method to use to make an image). It is and always has been littered with references to technology, art history, horror movies, science fiction and pop music.”
For Dunn, the inspiration for her painting was her time at a residency in a small village in Portugal that she attended last year. “Every morning I would go and visit the town square and have a coffee in this café that all the women would go to. I would sit and draw, observing the rhythms of the town and finding inspiration in the characters, their routines, and the quiet significance of daily rituals and communal moments,” she explains.
Dunn is particularly interested in depicting domestic scenes that explore the intimacy of personal experiences, “I’m drawn to the spaces and relationships that shape our everyday lives – those fleeting moments that carry emotional weight. Much of my work navigates the line between truth and fiction, examining how personal and imagined narratives can overlap, shift, and be exaggerated.”
First established in 2015 as the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, the prize was relaunched in 2024 as the Bayside Painting Prize with an increase in prize money for the Major Prize to $25,000, making it one of the most generous non-acquisitive painting prizes in the country.
The Bayside Painting Prize is the only annual painting prize held in Melbourne. The finalist exhibition brings together a broad range of artists from across Australia, both established and lesser known, whose varied approaches to the painted medium conveys the breadth and diversity of painting in Australia today.
The $10,000 acquisitive Beckett Local Prize, named in honour of local modernist artist Clarice Beckett, is open to artists who demonstrate a connection to the municipality of Bayside or whose submitted work is of local subject matter. Michelle Ussher took out the Beckett Local Prize for her painting, Glimmer (2025), which will be acquired by the Bayside City Council Art and Heritage Collection. There is also a $1000 People’s Choice Prize, announced at the conclusion of the exhibition.
This year’s judges include Dr Vincent Alessi, Director and CEO of Linden New Art, Melissa Keys, Senior Curator, Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Joanna Bosse, Curator, Bayside Gallery.
Both winners of the major prize, who have entered the Bayside Painting Prize several times before winning, attest to the need to cultivate resilience. For those thinking about submitting to the Prize, Rendall urges: “Keep working, be patient, keep entering”, while Dunn points out: “You never know what the judges are going to select, so my advice would be to select a work that you really love and that you think really represents your practice.”
The finalist exhibition of the Bayside Painting Prize is now open at Bayside Gallery, Brighton until 22 June 2025.
