Artist Jonny De Painter, of Pātea, in Taranaki, won the Cleveland National Art Awards supreme award for his mixed-media work titled Please Like Me in a ceremony attended by about 190 people at the Dunedin Railway Station yesterday evening.
After winning the award, which came with a $9000 prize, Mr De Painter said he felt "fantastic".
The win came at a good time, as he needed to do some upkeep on his house.
"I’m really like, desperately broke," Mr Painter said.
His winning work was a chained book, which was a medieval idea for fixing a text to a wall.
It had been made from ephemera from his studio which needed to be used up.
His works were usually about class struggle, although the theme was not so prevalent with the winning item and the other work he entered in the competition, Survival of the Rich.
Please Like Me had come about by accident and featured a cardboard bat and folded pages.
It read a bit like a manifesto which was all cut up and had passages taken from obscure texts. It also featured personal quotes of his, such as "cure the wounds of advertising".
It reflected a persona he had made, which he described as "not very likeable".
Most of his life had been spent as an artist, and he had formerly won an award as part of a 24-hour film-festival team, De Painter said.
Some of his work is held at Dunedin’s Hocken Library and at Te Papa in Wellington.
