Image above: Road to Other – Western Mountains oil on canvas diptych 116 x 157 cm.
Congratulations to Raymond Arnold who was selected as a finalist in the The John Glover Acquisitive Prize (Glover Prize) for 2023 with his work Road to Other – Western Mountains.
Celebrating the legacy of John Glover, the Glover Prize has become one of Australia’s most significant awards for landscape painting, open to artists from anywhere in the world. It is awarded annually by The John Glover Society Inc. for the work judged the best contemporary landscape painting of Tasmania.
Landscape painting is defined in its broadest sense. The aim is to stimulate conversations about the meaning and possibilities expressed in the words landscape, painting and Tasmania.
The winner receives $75,000 plus a bronze maquette of colonial artist John Glover, designed by Peter Corlett and valued at $5000. The Glover Prize is acquisitive, selected from around 40 works chosen by a panel of eminent judges.
Of his work, Arnold says: “My ‘Road to Other – Western Mountains’ painting has been developed over five months and has ‘shape-shifted’ from a small plain air painted fragment of a rocky landscape to a larger swathe of colour and brush marks across a diptych format – from a depiction of random/erratic forms to a symbolic flow of environmental churn! Weather, fire, road infrastructure and mining impacts shaping country and leaving its bones i.e. the rock and the tree stumps exposed as symbolic elements within a graphic ossuary. Writers use brackets to add information to a sentence without changing it’s meaning and in the context of this ‘Artist’s Statement’ I see my painting exisiting within brackets in the larger story of Tasmanian (West Coast) art i.e. suspended somewhere between an explorer’s straining view of a dynamic indigenous landscape and an artist’s late work depicting a sovereign, albeit environmentally corrupted, ‘First Nations’ world.” VIEW ONLINE EXHIBITION OF FINALISTS HERE