Emotion in the everyday: this year's Darling Portrait Prize showcases full spectrum of post-COVID life

There are children - poignant and hopeful - and people with animals as metaphors. Community builders and frontline workers, writers and filmmakers.

And, sprinkled among these portraits of Australian life, there are the many painters who have turned their gaze inwards, and onto themselves. The temptation, when challenged by a prize with such broad parameters, must surely be to indulge, to wallow, to mourn loudly about all that we have seen and lost, sacrificed or taken up, as we have contorted ourselves around a pandemic that has seemingly settled in to stay.

And yet, the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize isn't nearly as sobering as one would expect, given it's been two years since the last one. Two years in which to consume the atmosphere, to work through what it all means, to rage and protest and even to just give in to personal despair.

It's only the second iteration of the Darling, the National Portrait Gallery's painting prize established to honour one of the gallery's greatest patrons, the late Gordon Darling.

But Sandra Bruce, the gallery's head of exhibitions and collections, says that along with the surprising sense of optimism - perhaps the stretch of time since the last one has been exactly the space artists have needed - there was a 90 per cent increase in the number of entries this year - 577, with 39 finalists now on display.

"Essentially, everything that has happened in the last two years, ultimately has been borne out and what artists are creating these days, and what they're talking about and how they're choosing to depict themselves and subjects in their portraiture," she says.

"I think that this year is a really interesting spread of people's experiences and you can absolutely get a sense of people still referring to how COVID has impacted their lives.

"But I think that equally, things seem to have sort of shaken out a little bit now. While everybody talks about a new normal and that's all well and good and it is what it is, and I think we're all coping quite well as a community and a society, artists have always painted portraits of themselves. They've always done self-portraits, and artists have always captured people and created portraits of people that catch their attention.

"And so COVID notwithstanding, I think this very much is ultimately a really lovely, broad-reaching display of the people in our community right now."

She's spent more time than most with these portraits, having watched the judges - gallery director Karen Quinlan, her London counterpart Nicholas Cullen, via Zoom, and also virtually, Clothilde Bullen, head of Indigenous programs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia - struggle to make their ultimate decision as to the winner and runners-up, and then the process of curating and hanging the works.

"I feel, broadly speaking, there's a sense of sort of gentle optimism about the exhibition," she says.

"There are some deep conversations going on with some of the artists and some of the sitters, but ultimately, what comes out of it all is optimism, and I think that's really quite lovely and beautiful."

The winning work, a self-portrait by Jaq Grantford, shows the artist staring directly at the viewer, with her hands over her mouth, and a handful of paintbrushes pushed into a messy top-knot.

While the COVID references are undeniable - obscuring half of our faces, leaving only our eyes and over-washed hands to communicate - the work has a playful undertow. Like her untidy hair, there's a sense of ambivalence about the over-arching narrative COVID has forced on us all.

"The pandemic for me has been a time of mixed feelings," Grantford says in her artist's statement.

"A time of fear and concern for the safety of the people I know. Uncertainty about seeing my daughter and mother when the borders closed. And then in contrast to this, there was a guilty relief that the chaos of life could simply stop. That I could enter the studio and create."

And then, the kicker; she reveals that the hair that unwittingly plays a starring role in her hyper-real work disappeared after Grantford was diagnosed with cancer.

"Although it has since started to grow back, I now feel some level of disconnect from the woman with a full head of hair in this self portrait," she says.

Life, hey? It's a good metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. Pensive, observant, looking outwards at the world while acknowledging that something in all of us has changed irrevocably.

"I do really like that for us, we don't stipulate any conditions around the nature of the sitter, other than that they are an Australian citizen, or they've been a resident or they have a strong association with Australia," Bruce says.

"That is really our only parameter and it is because, you know, at the National Portrait Gallery, one of our jobs is to be the face of Australia.

"While we absolutely are very happy to take and recognise portraiture of people who other people might recognise, that's not at the core of the prize. Ultimately, what we want is really strong art. And we want amazing compositions that speak to the artist giving us a sense of who that person is that we're looking at and who we're exploring."

It's what the National Portrait Gallery does best; hot on the heels of the Darling is the National Photographic Portrait Prize, the wildly popular exhibition that feels, somehow, even more democratic. More people feel able to take photographs, or be photographed, than to paint or sit.

Meanwhile, if it's all too close to home for you, the blockbuster Shakespeare to Winehouse exhibition of celebrity portraits from the National Portrait Gallery of London is still running until July 17.

But perhaps that's exactly the point; we're all people, living our lives, almost always in extraordinary times. Shakespeare and the Queens Elizabeth, Ed Sheeran and Amy Winehouse - all in the same building as frontline workers from Australia, pensive Australian creatives, and innocent children caught in the act of simply living.