What exactly are the key concerns of contemporary Australian landscape painting? And who wants to know? Alexandra Sasse takes you deeper into these latest landscapes in this review of the John Leslie Art Prize 2022.
Winner of the NSW Parliamentary Plein Air Award, Evan Salmon’s pared back compositions eloquently remind us that we live in the most extraordinary of worlds.
An Intimate Distance: conversations with artists during lockdown #3. Hendrik Kolenberg talks with Alexandra from his home and studio in Sydney. October 2021. What personal impact has the pandemic had on you? I don’t know anyone who has had COVID but my brother died about a month ago in Adelaide, of cancer. His eldest daughter, …
Artist Mark Dober talks with Alexandra Sasse during the long Victorian lockdown of 2021.
We have an ongoing love affair with the landscape in Australia. Landscape forms both our imaginative and physical worlds and seeps inexorably into our literature and art. It doesn’t nurture. It is mercurial. Water, the most essential element of life, is severely limited. Despite its whims, we are obsessed with its beauty.
Seeing the world as more than a backdrop or stage-set for unfolding narratives is the basic premise of landscape painting. It requires sensation rather than symbol to be the dominant motive. This is at odds with the corrosive didacticism of much academic art which looks for the obvious moral in every artwork. The recently set up Hadley’s Art Prize – a $100,000 prize for an Australian landscape painting, is a case in point. It has been called a landscape prize when what they really require is history painting, and a certain kind of history at that.
Hobart hotel owner Don Neil has launched one of Australia’s richest art prizes, with an annual $100,000 award for landscapes…. and this year invites artists to address the theme “history and place”.
Artist and curator Julie Gough, who is one of the judges, says the award encourages artists to think beyond European concepts of landscape as depictions of sublime nature. “History is about story, and the entrants have to consider that as much as things such as vegetation and landforms,” says Gough. “It will be interesting to see how people push that theme.”
The Australian 27th Jan 2017
And here is Ben Quilty, judging the 2017 Glover Prize for Australian landscape painting and commenting: