Kaaren and Julian Brown created the Kingston Prize national portrait competition 10 years ago to showcase Canadian talent and Canadian people. They were inspired by a similar competition in Sydney, Australia where they lived in the late 1960s.
The couple, who recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, had noticed a dearth of humanity in Canadian paintings, which are dominated by landscapes—a trend that in part began with the Group of Seven artists, according to Julian Brown.
“They did show them as empty, and the result is that Canadian landscape painters following the Group of Seven never show any people in the landscapes. You go to any commercial gallery and look at the landscapes—lovely stuff some of it—but you never see any people, and that’s wrong,” Brown says.
“We thought that a prominent, popular, promoted competition for portraiture would bring back a realization that the history of Canada is the history of its people. It’s not the history of lakes and rivers and strong west winds and pine trees,” he adds, explaining the couples’ motivation for creating the Kingston Prize, so named in honour of Kingston, Ont., the city where they raised their family.
