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Matthew Armstrong with his winning landscape, Transformed at Night.

NOTE: The People's Prize was won by Stephanie Tabram's acrylic on linen, Ranelagh Twilight — The Jam Factory.

POSTED: 09 MARCH 2009

Urban streetscape nets Glover landscape prize*

By MARGARETTA POS

The richest prize for a landscape painting in Australia — the $30,000 Glover Prize — has been won by a Tasmanian artist for an urban streetscape. The oil painting, Transformed at Night by Matthew Armstrong, depicts a night scene of a Hobart street sloping uphill after a downpour.

Judges for the 2009 prize were The Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald, National Gallery of Victoria senior contemporary art curator Alex Baker and 2007 Archibald Prize winner John Beard.

"It is not a view of untamed nature or a conventional treatment of the picturesque, but it is a landscape nonetheless — a landscape with which we can all identify, but feel as though we are seeing it for the first time," the judges said in their comments.

This is the sixth year of the Glover Prize, held to honour the place of colonial artist John Glover (1767-1849) in Australian art history. Glover arrived in Hobart Town in 1831, later moving to Patterdale at Deddington, near Evandale, where the Glover Prize Exhibition is held.

The previous winners of this prize for a Tasmanian landscape were Michael McWilliams, Stephen Lees, David Keeling, Raymond Arnold and Neil Haddon.

The Glover Prize  was established by the John Glover Society Inc. It is chaired by Rose Falkiner, with Jane Deeth as exhibition coordinator and The Federal Group as principal sponsor. Entries were received from around Australia, with 43 paintings selected for exhibition in the Falls Park Pavilion, Evandale, for four days, until Tuesday (March 10th) at 4pm.

Unluckily, Armstrong's painting is hanging in a corner which makes it difficult to see, but it  is worth taking a good look. The artist told Launceston's The Examiner newspaper he had painted Hobart as he saw it — not the iconic buildings and landmarks, but the commonplace in suburbia.

''It is that special moment in an ordinary scene that I look for," he said.

The result is familiar yet not familiar, with a stillness that is arresting and invites the viewer to imagine the lives of the people who inhabit the street, but who are invisible.

A more traditional but beautiful landscape, Silver Blade by Laura Matthews, was highly commented by the judges, as was Jason Cordero's wonderfully evocative I Should Not be Here.

Visitors to the hugely popular exhibition are invited to vote for a $3000 People's Prize — which will be announced at the end of the exhibition. I voted for  Michaye Boulter's Noah's World, an arresting painting of a child crouched beneath a Glover-like gum tree as a mountainous sea swells around the lone figure.