Melbourne-born artist Jaq Grantford has been a finalist multiple times in portrait prizes such as the Black Swan Prize, the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the Portia Geach Memorial Award. Also an illustrator, she held several solo exhibitions at the Dromkeen Museum of Children's Literature between 2004 and 2010, and her work was included in international exhibitions of children's book illustration in Portugal and Slovakia in 2007. In 2016 and 2021 she was one of the artists selected for Women Painting Women, an exhibition of portraits held at the Burrinja Cultural Centre in Upwey, Victoria; and in 2021 she was included in an exhibition of work by women artists held at the European Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona. For over a decade, she has been participating in international prizes and exhibitions presented by organisations such as the Portrait Society of America, 33 Contemporary, Chicago, and the New Jersey-based Art Renewal Centre (ARC), of which Grantford is an Associate Living Master. In 2021, her painting Transparent was selected for the Contemporary Realism auction by Sotheby's, New York.
Grantford's portrait subjects include dancer Paul Mercurio; conductor Jonathon Welch; physician Catherine Crock; singer Lior Attar; radio announcer and musician Ed Le Brocq (Eddie Ayres); and composers Elena Kats-Chernin, Andrew Batterham and Nigel Westlake. Her portrait of actor Jacki Weaver was chosen for the Salon des Refusés in 2013, and won the People's Choice Award at the Black Swan Prize that year. Her painting of drag performer Ken Atherton, aka Tootsie, won Grantford her second Black Swan People's Choice Award in 2018. Grantford has also created many self-portraits, including a suite of paintings in which she imposes herself into paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, JMW Turner, Gustave Courbet, Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol. She was the winner of the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize with her work 2020.
