The winner was announced at the Muswellbrook Australia Day Ceremony held at Denman Indoor Sports Centre.

 

Winner of the 1st Muswellbrook Australia Day Acquisitive Photographic Award was
Russell Esdaile with highly commended's going to Edwina Casey, Melissa Jimmieson, Fiona McBurney, Jennifer Mezzina and Andrew Roberts.

Following in the recent popular exhibition Steel, this time round we look at some of the many applications of wood from both 2D and 3D aspects.

 

Beginning with the representational imagery in David Blackburn's tonal study in the en plein air tradition The bent trees - Hampton and a painting by Aleta Scott portraying Wattle Time, we then move to a more loose and expressive approach in the work by Arnold Shore entitled A Bush Hut.

 

Moving on, signature style works where the various artist's personal techniques of paint application, composition and non realistic interpretations are the governing force, is the work of Grace Cossington-Smith's Design in Bush, with her all over blocky brushwork, Peter Freeman's Trees using a myriad of entangled calligraphic, multi coloured and sinuous linear brushwork, David van Nunen's swatches of brilliant patches of colour in his Midday Botanical Gardens, Hosefa Tavolara expressive and directly painted Two Tree II, and  Alison Hodges' Trees, which explores organic growth rhythms in loose evocative ink line work. John Montefiore's Sunset From Mt Vincent draws on both the Eastern and Western traditions of interpreting the landscape. The writhing forms of the branches of the featured tree reveal both an astute awareness of its core structure and a very perceptive knowledge of its key characteristics.

 

Tom O'Brien's A Mill Log illustrates the theme material and serves as a link between the 2D works and the rest of the selection which consists of pieces of sculpture fabricated from wood or lignum based material.

 

Of special interest is the variety of finishes applied to the surfaces of the sculptural works to either enhance or disguise the base material, wood. In a number of cases the natural finishes have been retained as is, evident in Charlotte Drake-Brockman's Grape Vine Basket. The patina acquired by exposure to the elements also helps to create a unified surface to Ingo Dietmar Kleinert's Memorial to Ludwig Becker assembled using both found natural and processed pieces of timber (illustrated above). Similarly, a combination of highly polished and rough sawn timber was used by Peter Taylor in his Anti Conservation Piece as well as his Eight Cylinder Kitchen Cupboard. John Armstrong also exploited this duality of combining the rough and the smooth qualities of wood in his sculpture Foot Block.

 

In total contrast are pieces which have a polychromed surface which completely obscures the base material. From the earliest times, the application of pigment has been a constant feature employed by artists to decorate the surface of their work. This is represented by the work of Aleksander Danko in his Incident - Ambivalence7/11 and Box and also in the two works by Bob Jenyns Plane Series and At the Risk of a Fine.