The Glover Prize 2020: Raymond Arnold and Rodney Pople

In News March 27, 2020

Congratulations to Raymond Arnold and Rodney Pople who were selected as finalists in The Glover Prize this year.

Celebrating the legacy of John Glover, The John Glover Art Prize (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. John Glover was a successful British painter and contemporary of Turner and John Constable. Glover painted in the picturesque style advocated by Claude Lorraine, taking the Grand Tour of Europe and wandering the moors and mountains of Britain in search of inspiration.

To view the exhibition catalogue, click here.

Image above: Raymond Arnold  And the Land was washed clean!   2019  oil on canvas  120 x 170 cm

“I’ve been making paintings of the road into the high valleys and the mined terraces surrounding Queenstown on the West coast of Tasmania. At times I shelter from the rain in the lee of my vehicle and on one occasion the wind tore at this particular canvas and dumped it metres away across the muddy ground. In my attachment to this place and atmosphere I’m searching for an expression of vulnerable, scarred terrain undergoing further transformation. In this action I’m echoing many years of work on my large scale etching panorama of the Mt Lyell range titled Elsewhere World. I was inspired by a section of a Seamus Heaney poem which read: Where can it be found again, An Elsewhere world, beyond Maps and atlases…” Raymond Arnold, 2020

 

Image below:  Rodney Pople  TAS-IN-FIDELITAS   2019  egg tempera on linen  190 x 190 cm

“This painting reflects upon current environmental crises, particularly in relation to Tasmania’s lost natural habitats and its extinct or threatened plants and animals. It borrows the format of Tasmania’s 1917 coat of arms and refers to the motto inscribed beneath, Ubertas et Fidelitas (Fertility and Faithfulness). The two Tasmanian Tigers display, in place of the coat of arms original symbols of industry and agriculture, an art historical symbol of fertility, Gustave Courbet’s “Origine du monde” (The origin of the world, 1866). Set against a brown landscape decimated after decades of exploitation by the agricultural and forestry industries, the painting heralds a land stripped of life. The optimistic “fertility and faithfulness” of a hundred years ago has here been replaced by a barren landscape governed by avarice and neglect.” Rodney Pople, 2020

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