Time and tide is from a series of paintings Robyn Sweaney is currently working on about the Australian coastal landscape. “These paintings are about time past and the promise of slowing down in the future,” says Sweaney, “the anticipation, contemplation, sunlight and shadows, still salt air and silent static moments. Approaching the landscape as a living vessel of memory, the work considers how certain places conjure images from the past, tempered with the transient shadow of the present. They express personal embedded ideas about my own experiences of place and of those that have been here before.”
The Wynne Prize is awarded annually for ‘the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists’.
This open competition is judged by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Finalists are displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery (although in the early years all entrants were hung). Many winning paintings have become icons in Australian landscape art, entering the collections of public galleries, including our own.
The prize was established following a bequest by Richard Wynne, who died in 1895, and first awarded in 1897, in honour of the official opening of the Gallery at its present site.
The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prize finalists and winners are on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until October 2, 2017.
