Pearls and Irritations

It’s astonishing enough that 403 landscapes by Australian artists were entered in this year’s John Leslie Art Prize. Even more surprising is the superb quality and diversity of the 52 shortlisted, which are exhibited in Sale’s Gippsland Art Gallery until 24 November.

Only artists from Western Australia and the Northern Territory failed to be among finalists. A panel of four judges – two artists and two gallery curators – decided in September that Newcastle painter Peter Gardiner’s Elephant deserved the top award of $30,000.

Australia boasts several prestigious and lucrative competitions for landscape painting. Because of its association with the Archibald, the best-known is the Wynne and its $50,000 prizemoney. But there are also the Glover ($80,000), the Heysen ($15,000), and the much-less-known John Leslie. The latter’s 2024 biennial contest was its 13th iteration.

John Leslie was born and bred in Sale (population 15,305), a third-generation pastoralist and businessman who was thrice the town’s mayor. Through his foundation, Sale gained a theatre, an aged-care facility, a sound shell, sporting complexes and a nature trail. When it was mooted that the town should have an art gallery, he donated its first exhibits. To raise the gallery’s profile, he founded his eponymous landscape contest in 2000. He died in 2016.

I was so impressed with the quality, colour and diversity of the 2024 finalists that my first visit had to be repeated next day. Many finalists’ canvases are big, allowing close observers to ‘enter’ them, as Mark Rothko insisted that the best paintings should allow you to do.

Elephant was two by 1.8 metres, for instance, a monochrome in a tawny pale grey of a forested valley. The dense trees are not Australian, and the work suggests Constable. In the distance, a cloudy V-shaped swirl of light seems to signify little. It’s the picture’s enigmatic focus. I saw no elephants.

I preferred Harley Manifold’s You don’t want to be a sofa bed (two by 1.53 metres), which shows a road in near-darkness, yellow lines on either side and up the middle retreating to a distant vanishing point. Pale rose-and-indigo-tinted cumulus clouds hover distantly above the road and dark vegetation (perhaps) is on either side. Beneath the clouds is a small but radiant blue light that made me think of Van Gogh’s Starry night over the Rhône and JMW Turner’s evocative landscapes that feature a solitary dim but dominant luminous point.

There was the hyper-realism of Geoff Coleman’s Angophora Costata, another big painting in which a single rusty gum, its smooth trunk as white as a Namatjira ghost gum, its leaves feathery, rears up the canvas. Our perspective is near — and from the base of — the trunk, and we view the tree and its ascending branches as they head to a pale-blue sky with a few wispy clouds.

Amanda Johnson’s Stranglehold – Otway Ranges immerses you in heavy undergrowth punctuated by tall bullet-straight trunks, and Kathryn Ryan’s Sentinels shows trees in near-darkness, a backlight provided by perhaps diffuse moonlight.

Alongside these are abstracts by Rosie Lloyd-Giblett, Naomi Hobson, David Rossiter and Mess Noise, for instance, as well as Nic Malacari’s marvellously surreal A lie travels halfway round the world whilst the truth stops and ties its shoelaces.

I came away from Sale wondering if I could afford several of the painters’ works, perhaps the best sign of the health of Australian landscape painting. You may view the 52 finalists’ canvases at the Gippsland Art Gallery’s website. Or even visit.

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