Judge – Jenna Packer,
A painter, printmaker and illustrator who has been exhibiting since 1990 both within New Zealand and abroad.

Anne Baldock, Leith Street Flatters
This painting stood out for me and I found myself retuning to it again and again, looking from a distance and then up very close, trying to work out what was so compelling. The composition is well balanced but surprising, as is the use of colour, which is never chosen easily but considered and subtle. The brushwork is meticulous, even painstaking, but the effect is lively and spontaneous. The entire scene is stylised yet carefully observed and although it might well have originated as a photo ( the sense of waiting and posing is present in the attitudes of the boys in the scene) it is not tied down to a photographic representation. Anne Baldock has managed to take what she needs from the details available to her and go so much further, giving us both a glimpse forward into the imagined relationships and world of the flatters, and their dogs, and a glimpse back through her own lense, into her very own, very particular way of seeing, thinking and feeling.

Leith Street Flatters by Anne Baldock

Russell Cundall, Oamaru Harbour Sunset
This is a small  painting of a scene which has no doubt been painted before and yet Russell Cundall has made it really fresh and interesting and absorbing. I kept returning to it and every time I noticed more – the tiny figures and scraffito poles giving points of focus, the instinctive balancing of colour and composition, and the lively brushwork which is confident and gestural but never overworked.

Omaru Harbour Sunset by Russell Cundall

Desiree DeLauney, Ti Kouka
Desiree DeLauney’s painting caught my eye immediately with its clarity and stylised forms, her  confident flattening of the landscape components and the great contrast between the lower part of the work and the agitated, textured sky. The flapping cabbage tree leaves which we follow down into the bulbous trunk, and the shredded edge of the hillside link the two very different parts of the painting, making it cohesive but surprising. Ti Kouka has been painted many times and is, to use an overused expression, iconic, but Desiree’s treatment of the scene is unusual and confident and kept me coming back to look again.

Ti Kouka by Desiree de Laney

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