Read bytea column from table and convert into base64.....

Hi,
I have a bytea column which I want to convert into base64. At the 
moment I am reading the bytea colum into my java app as a byte[]. I am 
then calling another static method to convert the byte[] into base64. I 
want postgreSQl to handle the conversion so my app can read in the 
base64 string.

So for example:

select (base64)byteaColumn from tableName where artistID = x

many thanks in advance