Torah Bright

Champion snowboarder Torah Bright is Australia’s most successful female winter Olympian, winning a gold in Vancouver in 2010 and a silver in Sochi in 2014 (where she was the only athlete to compete in all three snowboarding disciplines).

Artist Zoe Young, who painted this portrait of Bright for the 2014 Archibald Prize, trained as a ski racer with Bright’s older siblings.

Says Young: ‘Originally I planned to do an epic painting, something larger-than-life that captured the excitement and daring tricks of her sport, something really bright, maybe even with a splash of glitter.’ Instead, she opted to paint a calm, introspective moment, ‘somewhere between the guts and the glory’, and added rosewater to the acrylic paint on ply.