By Dylan Rainforth
Shannon Smiley should be living up to his name, having just won the $20,000 John Leslie Art Prize for landscape painting. Smiley won for a hyper realistic oil painting, Untitled, Burnley. It's just some weeds running up an embankment by a graffitied concrete wall – but it encapsulates and reinvigorates an entire tradition of landscape painting. "Walking around", Smiley says, he's most attracted to areas where the neglected urban environment merges with "the wild part of nature", an aesthetic he sees as belonging to the romantic tradition in landscape art. The non-acquisitive prize attracted more than 400 entries from every state in Australia and was judged by NGV curator Jane Devery, former NGV director Gerard Vaughan and 2012 prizewinner Tony Lloyd. The judges praised Smiley for producing "a very beautiful image out of something you wouldn't look at twice". Finalists' works are on show at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale until late November.
wellington.vic.gov.au/Enjoying-Wellington/Gippsland-Art-Gallery