Lucy Pulvers

Lucy was born in Kyoto, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two older sisters, also artists, and her older brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2001 and is bilingual in Japanese and English. In 2014 she was awarded the Thea Proctor Scholarship by the Julian Ashton Art School. She paints in both oils and watercolour. Lucy recently spent a year in the UK and travelled in Europe, spending time particularly in Germany. This was an intense period of looking at art, as well as painting and drawing while living in London. Every year since 2019, her watercolour paintings have been selected for inclusion in the annual Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours exhibit in London. In the 2020 watercolour exhibition, a self-portrait was awarded the ‘President’s Choice Award’. In 2024, Lucy received the ‘Anthony J Lester Art Critic Award’. In April 2025, was elected to be a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, founded in 1831. Lucy exhibits regularly and has been a finalist twice in the Portia Geach Portraiture Prize, a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, a semi-finalist in the BP Portraiture Prize in London and, more recently, a finalist in the Blake Prize and twice a semi-finalist in the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award in London. Lucy is essentially a figure painter and portrait artist. All of her artistic work is rooted in her relationship to line and drawing as the foundation of her paintings, both in watercolour and oils. Her paintings are all, in essence, an exploration of the inner emotional life of human beings. She uses geometry, strong colour and bold lines to give her works an emotional power. These elements of colour and line are woven together to synthesise a surface world that captures a moment in the inner life of the figure portrayed