A curious crowd of year 4 students from Majura Primary School gathered around gardening and food legend Stephanie Alexander on Wednesday at the National Portrait Gallery to talk about her new portrait before she headed to Parliament House to announce the first National Kitchen Garden Awards.

The artwork, commissioned from Adelaide painter Tsering Hannaford by the gallery and completed last year with funds provided by Marilyn Darling, depicts Alexander wearing purple in front of a purple background.

Alexander told the assembled pupils how fantastic their Majura Park kitchen garden was. She had first seen it 10 years ago before it had matured into the lush present-day garden.

She declared herself flattered and delighted at the commission saying she had been given a list of three artists but had settled on Hannaford because of her ability “to show personality rather than just a likeness, like in a cartoon.”

The first of  her four sittings, she said, had begun with a white blank board and it was “like magic to watch what followed”.

Another special experience was looking out of the corner of her eye at Hannaford painting her eyes.

She had chosen to wear purple, she said, because of poet Penny Joseph’s words: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.”

Director of the National Portrait Gallery Bree Pickering fielded questions from the kids – Do you have to be famous to be painted? What was Alexander’s favourite Jamaican food? And why had she started her foundation?

A self-described “accidental chef”, Alexander first conceived the idea of offering inspirational food education to children in schools in 2001 with a program at Collingwood Primary School in Melbourne.

She founded the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation in 2004 and since then, more than one million children have benefited from the program.

“I was lucky my family cared about sitting around the table every night… they were enthusiastic gardeners… mum cooked from all sorts of foreign cultures and often there was a story attached to the food,” she said.