West Burke painter Terry Ekasala has won the 2023 Vermont Prize, an annual award that celebrates and supports the best visual art being made in the state. Her selection, by a five-member jury, was announced on Friday. The Vermont Prize is a collaboration between Brattleboro Museum & Art Center; Burlington City Arts; the Current, a contemporary art center in Stowe; and the Hall Art Foundation, which has a campus in Reading. The prize jury is composed of one juror from each organization, along with one guest juror. The Vermont Prize is open to individuals and collaborating artists working in any visual medium and living in Vermont. Brandon-based visual artist, graffiti scholar and educator Will Kasso Condry won the 2022 Vermont Prize, the first awarded. Winners receive $5,000, and their work is showcased and archived at vermontprize.org. Ekasala is an abstract painter who works in oil on linen and acrylic on paper. This year’s guest juror, Chrissie Iles, the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, noted that in Ekasala’s paintings, subjects are suggested but never fully revealed. “Suspending the image somewhere between abstract composition and storytelling, Ekasala creates interior, psychological spaces that evoke memory and place,” Iles wrote. According to an artist statement, Ekasala does not plan her work. “If we have to fit ourselves into a category, I would say I am an intuitive painter, as I really don’t prepare a work with sketches or even a general subject beforehand,” she wrote. So, how does she start? “I can’t say, 100 percent,” she told Seven Days on Friday. “I don’t think about it.” At the outset, she can’t know in what direction she will go, she said: “I just start with layers of paint. Like, when I’m doing oils, I just work with layers and kind of make forms. And I just randomly choose colors. And I know it sounds kind of mysterious, but it just starts happening, little by little.” A big oil painting can take months, she said. “Sometimes it comes pretty quick, but because I like layers and the texture, I tend to work on it for quite a while,” she explained. “I can come to an aesthetic I kind of like, but I don’t like the fact that there’s not enough texture or paint on the linen, so I have to keep on going.” …