When you think about a landscape painting it's highly likely that the landscape is either something grand like a Turneresque sunset or a version of a well worn cliché, a gum tree with sheep or an old building in a paddock.
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Newbridge artist David Lake though has flipped those preconceptions on what makes a great landscape painting on its head with a dry, dusty mullock heap under a parched, almost cloudless sky.
The painting's minimalism is why Mr Lake believes that his work was selected with 120 others to be one of the finalists in the inaugural Capital Art Prize.
"You have to create something that really stands out," he said.
Chosen from a field of more than one thousand submissions, it's fair to say that Mr Lake was pleased when he heard that he was in the running for the $5,000 landscape prize.
"This is its first year so I'm really pleased that I've been selected," he said.
But with his humour as dry as the mullock heap, Mr Lake is cautious about his chances.
"These prizes are won by other people," he said. "Once you get into the bigger prizes that exist it's often more about the connections than producing a great work of art."
After 40 years of painting landscapes, that cynicism on the art scene is a difficult one to shake, but Mr Lake is optimistic that his work "The Diggings - Lightning Ridge" may be the one piece that will shake the landscape tree.
"The opal fields of Lightning Ridge have been a recurring theme in my art practice for the past twenty two years as I find the scarred landscape, mullock heaps, rusting cars and old mining equipment a most engaging subject," he wrote in his entry application.
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Rather than a natural environment or a built one, The Diggings represents a man made wasteland where the buildings are shrunk in the background and the saltbush are trying hard to reclaim the environment.
Mr Lake doesn't rush his works either, the version of the painting he submitted was a larger one than he had done previously.
"I had painted a smaller version of it a few years back which I thought needed more work so I reworked it late last year," he said.
"Once I was happy with it I redid it on a much larger board which is now in the prize. It was just one of those works that will work in a much larger format."
The capital Art Prize also has a People's Choice section as well with a $2,500 prize included.
For the full selection of landscapes in the prize go to https://nationalcapitalartprize.com.au/2021finalists/.
Mark Logan
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
