Western Australian artist Mary-Lynne Stratton has won the $50,000 Collie Art Prize for her painting Ranges around Ross River NT – chosen by a panel of eminent art judges, Professor Ted Snell and Carl Altman from WA with visiting judge Professor Sasha Grishin from ANU in Canberra.
‘Mary Lee Stratton’s [work] struck all the judges as being amazing, absolutely amazing,’ said Professor Grishin. ‘It’s vibrant, it’s visual intelligent, and it’s incredibly sophisticated. There’s so many levels of subtlety when you look into the painting, the faint pearl-like scattering of dots the echoing vibrating colour reflexes that are throughout the work. It’s a painting you actually want to enter inside, and once you enter it and go for a walk, it’s really quite exciting what you can find there. You see pools of darkness, radiating hills and that wonderful boom of the sky. All of us, the more we looked at it, the more we fell in love with it and thought this is really a very, very major achievement from an artist who’s subtle, sophisticated and who knows the country, has looked at the country feels the country evokes the country, the sense of identity, the sense of place.’
Two prizes of $5000 were awarded separately to Peteris Ciemitis from WA for his diptych ES and ID, with the second $5000 prize going to Indigenous Queensland artist Brian Robinson for his linoprint, Bedhan Lag: Land of the Kalwalagal. The fourth prize of $4000 for the Best Western Australian Art Award was awarded to Olga Cironis for her work Breath. Each artist will also have the opportunity to hold individual exhibitions at the Collie Art Gallery in Western Australia.
New sponsors to come aboard this year include Synergy with a significant injection which has enabled an art competition for the town’s schoolchildren which attracted over 500 entries from kindergarten to junior high school level. Prizes will be awarded to both winning entrants and their participating schools on Friday 21 February.
The work of all 45 finalists is on show in the ‘Collie Art Prize CAP2020’ exhibition at the Collie Art Gallery from 29 February to 5 April 2020.
