2025 Winner
Louise Kermode
Home: Waterloo, Ontario
Title: Madonna in a Tulip Chair
Media: Oil on aluminum composite panel
Dimensions: 116 x 76 cm
Instagram: @louisekermode
ARTIST STATEMENT
Madonna in a Tulip Chair is a portrait of Madonna (Donna) Meaney, who, as a young woman, modeled for both Christopher and Mary Pratt. In doing so, she became central to some of the most enduring representations of the female figure in Canadian painting.
Frequently depicted nude or semi-nude, Donna’s body was mediated through the artist’s gaze: at times through Christopher Pratt’s idealizing, detached vision of the female form, and at other times through Mary Pratt’s more ambivalent, domestic, and psychologically charged lens.
Mary Pratt’s Girl in a Wicker Chair (1978) particularly influenced me when creating this work. The symmetrical composition and dramatic treatment of light in Pratt’s painting gives Donna a commanding presence while being simultaneously vulnerable—qualities that speak to the complex position of the model, the painter, and the viewer.
My work draws on both this lineage and an earlier visual tradition: the iconography of the Renaissance Madonna, with its reverence, and aura of sanctity. Yet rather than revisiting Donna as a youthful muse, I depict her as she is today, in her seventies. No longer framed solely through the gaze of others, she appears self-possessed, mature, and dignified, while embodying a different kind of vulnerability—one tied to age, memory, and mortality.
To me, Donna occupies a dual position: at once a mythic figure within Canadian art history, and at the same time an ordinary woman whose presence resists idealization.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
A unique high school art curriculum that prioritized painting and drawing skills and learning to depict what you see ignited Louise’s lifelong passion for realist art. She has a BA in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Toronto and more recently trained at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto. Her work is primarily focused on the figure and portraiture, with occasional experiments in other genres. She is interested in creating works with layered meaning that reference the art historical canon in new and provocative ways. She lives in Waterloo, ON.