Waterloo painter Louise Kermode won the $25,000 Kingston Prize
Kermode’s painting depicts an artist’s muse, now in her 70s
The 2025 Kingston Prize was announced over the weekend, and the winner is Waterloo-based painter Louise Kermode.
Since launching in 2005, the biennial competition has recognized Canadian portrait-painting and drawing that depicts real-life subjects.
Kermode’s winning piece, Madonna in a Tulip Chair, features renowned model-muse Donna Meaney, now in her 70s, referencing a 1978 Mary Pratt painting for which Meaney posed nude. That painting, Girl in Wicker Chair, was controversial, notably when it ran on the cover of Saturday Night magazine. As a teenager, Meaney had been hired as a housekeeper by artists Mary and Christopher Pratt, and was frequently painted and photographed by them.
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In an artist statement, Kermode described the portrait as a revisitation, decades later. “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,” she said. “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.”
Opeyemi Olukotun, of Manitoba and Orlin Mantchev, of Newfoundland and Labrador, were named as runner-ups.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
