Maldon Landscape Prize 2023

Essence of Place

The inaugural Landscape Prize 2023 “Essence of Place” is presented by Maldon Artist Network and EDGE Galleries. 

The winning artwork is Wild Winter Mountain, Leanganook by Robert Maclaurin.


PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD

The winner of the People’s Choice Award is After the Storm by Tara Royle.

Our response to place has wrought paintings that are figurative, spiritual, impressionistic, formal, abstract.

Since the beginning of time, humans have drawn Nature, into clay, on cave walls, on pots, inside tombs, on bark, stone, papyrus and eventually on canvas, paper, wood etc. The land is part of us, around us and among us. Our response to place has wrought paintings that are figurative, spiritual, impressionistic, formal, abstract.

Environment is another word for landscape… where we interact with, respond to, preserve or record impressions of our experience of place, and our visceral connection to its beauty and wildness and wonder.

The desire to record and bring landscape into inhabited built spaces, to bring Nature indoors, began in ancient indigenous, Aramaic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Grecian and Roman times, as if one could transfer the essence of being in landscape and keep this inspiration with us permanently. The Romantic Era brought us such aesthetic concepts as the Pastoral, the Picturesque and the Sublime. 

Much later, the Impressionists, Surrealists, Modernists and Post Modernists re-imagined landscape in ways which were both disturbing and unsettling, yet fascinating and strangely beautiful and beguiling.


What is landscape? 

If we eschew concepts of how we are meant to look at the land, what emerges? While there are certain elements and rules within many methodologies for painting, all of them valid and time-tested, what if we look with fresh eyes and new imagination?

We encourage all artists to bring their skills: everything they know, observe, and apprehend, to create work for consideration that may be formal, technically balanced, out of order, maverick, wildly inventive, traditionally understood, arresting, composed, sublime, joyous, anguished, abstract or a combination of the above.


HMR Foundation

The generous sponsor for the Landscape Prize is the HMR Foundation.