Out of 30 finalists of the 2023 Kingston Prize art exhibition, one Toronto artist won the grand prize.

The Kingston Prize is a biennial art competition for contemporary Canadian painters to submit their work. The exhibition is held at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ontario. Winners of the prize relieve $20,000 in prize money with two others getting honourable mentions. This year's competition is the ninth with the first being in 2005.

This years winner of the exhibition is Toronto artist Shaun Downey, with Jim Bravo and Chrystal Phan as the honourable mentions. There are at total of six finalists from Toronto. Toronto finalist artists include Houssam Alloum, Kristy Blackwell, Mihyun Maria Kim and Lisa Graziotto.

The winner was announced on Oct. 13, 2023.

All six of the Toronto finalists use oil paints in their submission. Styles range from hyperrealism to impressionist. Despite the range in style, each submission focuses on a human subject.

“When I'm painting a portrait [I ask] does it express that person, does it express what I learned about that person in our brief time together? And is this sort of a comfortable warm image that I would want to spend the time painting and hopefully the client will want to spend time living with,” says Downey.

Downey's submission Down the Elevator is his fourth submission to the Kingston Prize and his third time in the shortlist. His first submission to the exhibition was in 2017, winning the honourable mention. While studying to be an illustrator at Sheridan College in the early 2000s, he says he shifted his focus to high realism and oil paints which he has been doing since.

For Down the Elevator, Downey took over 300 photos from different angles and digitally composited them to get to his final product. He says his favourite photos to use are when the model is “coming out of a smile” from a joke to capture the “perfect moment of a natural expression.”

Downey is not the only finalist to focus on hyperrealism. Alloum is a hyperrealist fine arts painter from Syria who moved to Canada in 2018. Alloum says he grew up with an interest in drawing which led him to study fine arts at Damascus University. Alloum’s painting Arthur the King is his second submission and acceptance to the finalists for the Kingston Prize.

“It is part of my story, because I always use the subject from the people around me,” says Alloum. “[The] subject of this [painting is my] friend. He is the one who gave me the opportunity to have my studio space right now. It was a different kind of connection with people, especially for someone like me who is new in Canada.”

In Alloum’s submission, he says that his aim was to show that “you don't need to be a king with [wealth and power] to be king in your life.” In his painting, the subject wears a tinfoil crown. He says that is to contrast the typically golden crown a king would wear.

“You can be king with your old scar, with your small pipe and just enjoying nature here in Canada. People really have different kinds of happiness and this is what makes me really interested to show this way how people deal with the concept of having the life that they need or they like.” says Alloum. “This subject showed me how people can have their own life in their own special way about how they deal with time and with life. This has built my experience as a human and as an artist to know more about life here in Toronto through people.”

Despite the difference in their art styles, Alloum and Bravo share the same sentiment of sharing human experiences in Toronto. Bravo first started painting in school because he loved the smell of oil paints. Professionally, he started in 2001. Las Costureras is his first submission to the Kingston Prize and is a portrait of a childhood memory.

“It's a point of view from myself as an eight year old. It's the living room of where we grew up on Bloor Street. And that's just a scene that I used to walk into almost every morning, it'd be my mom and her mom. Getting down to business being seamstresses,” says Bravo.

For Bravo the painting holds sentimental value as his mother passed away last year and is a reminder of her. He used family photos and recollections from his mother when she was in her hospital bed to piece together his old living room. Bravo says that when he got the acceptance email it took him a while to process it.

“The first thing I thought was that it's not the ultimate victory. It's amazing they get in, and that's enough for me. Anything else is gravy,” says Bravo. “I kind of feel like it's a win for them too. Because I always thought there was something very projectable about my mom, her personality was so big. And same with my grandmother, everyone who met them really loved them. I [think] it was a victory for them.”

Paintings from the other 2023 finalists can be found on the Kingston Prize website.

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