Judge – Associate Professor David Bell,
University of Otago College of Education

Jude Ansbacher, Plunge Pool
The artist has built on her skills in drawing and
painting, but has also taken risks, and capitalised
on the discoveries she has made in the past.
She has pushed the envelope to combine
closely managed drawing with freely gestured
marks, and even accidental drips of paint in
ways that echo the vigour and movement of the
scene. This has generated bushes and branches
filled with energy, hazy atmospherics, and in the
pool itself, a dancing layer of transparent over
translucent paint that allows us to see onto, and
through, the surface of the water to the rocks
below. This is an assured and fluent exercise
in painting that will evoke a sense of familiarity
in everyone who has walked the riverbanks or
dived into an ice-cold country stream.

Plunge Pool, by Jude Ansbacher

Pauline Bellamy
Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Sound
This is a painting that breathes a sense of
place, not by recording things – objects or
landmarks we can recognise readily – but
by communicating through its fluid layers of
transparent paint the experience of being there.
Viewers can feel the mysterious inky darkness
of deep fjord waters overhung by dense masses
of bush and precipitous rock faces. They can
view through veils of damp, cold, misty air into
a primeval world, little changed since the first
human visitors climbed down to the water’s
edge.

Pickersgill Harbour, by Pauline Bellamy

June Harris, Scarlet Schist
This is a daring, yet perfectly controlled,
composition – a carefully poised juxtaposition of
bright colour and the quiet earthiness of the rock
surfaces. The artist has drawn on her knowledge
of the whole language of painting here, building
layers of over-painting in vigorous milky strokes,
moving into impasto slabs of paint, and then into
inventive surfaces that suggest the rich colours,
surfaces, edges and shadows of the rock, but
transform these into a challenging, and visually
a very satisfying, visual engagement that will
reward viewing over time.

Scarlet Schist, by June Harris.

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