Bringing the digital lens to the canvas has helped young artist Adele Warner reach a life-changing moment in her expanding painting career.
Warner's fine painting skills, "sophisticated" understanding of shared experiences and ability to bring them to life with a degree of cheek has won her a three-month residency in Paris.
It was the major prize of the 2024 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, presented at the Art Gallery of NSW on Wednesday.
The residency, combined with $50,000 in funding, represented what the 24-year-old viewed as a chance to dive head-first into her work, albeit halfway across the world.
"I'm hoping it's a point in my life where I can really pivot towards focusing more on art and less on the other things, dedicate myself to producing a lot of good work," she told AAP.
"It's hard to balance having two jobs essentially and trying to make the one you really love work for you … I'm glad I'm going to have an opportunity to do that."
Scholarship judge Jelena Telecki said the winner's work showed an understanding of representation, transferred to canvas via exquisite painting skills.
"There is a really sophisticated understanding of shared images, things we recognise as part of a shared lived experience," she said.
"There's a lot of melancholy, but also humour, maybe even a little bit of irony, which I find interesting in the younger generation."
The gallery described Warner's work as reflecting on "the zeitgeist of the digital age, patchworking ideas and images from her life and memory with those found on Reddit, Wikimedia Commons and Instagram".
The Sydney woman said challenging art's norms by injecting some humour into her work helped her allow an audience to come along for her journey.
"The work selected is a composite image of stuff I found from Reddit and Wikipedia. I really like to represent the digital lens in my painting practice," she said.
"I don't like painting that takes itself too seriously. You've got to be able to engage with it and humour is a really easy way to bridge the gap to something that can often be a bit inaccessible to the random person."
Warner's residency will be at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Five other artists were awarded $10,000 and a two-week residency at the Shark Island Institute arts hub in Kangaroo Valley, NSW.
Those artists were Tommy Carman, Solomon Karmel-Shann, Scout Milsome, Lorna Quinn and Elle Wickens.
