Sulman Prize - Art Gallery of New South Wales

Some really nice paintings this year including a James Drinkwater painting magnificent in its scope (it is huge) and colour (see below). This artist is really talented and keeps on producing work of class and originality. This one looks like a Drysdale landscape but of course it is not. The horizontal split in the upper part of the canvas suggesting a horizon line.

This Nathan Hawkes painting (see below) has lovely colour use also, and a strange sense of fantasy that the explosion of colour tends to mitigate. The little faces that peep out are expecting what exactly. Is it with malice or something else. I guess each viewer will come to their own conclusions.

A painting by David griggs has a rider on a horse (see below), but the horse is an odd sort of bright red. I mean the grass is green and the sky is blue but why a red horse, and this particular type of red?

A green dog in Jessica Nothdurft's painting (see below) has a rangey outback feel about it, like is it feeding the man (Romulus?) somewhere on the western slopes. Anyway a nice companion piece to the red horse.

More ephemeral is Peter Graham's weird dreamy landscape (see below). Even thought this is a large canvas the palette is restrained and the lines are sort of fastened in place. It has that kind of dreamy power of a Blake especially since it also possesses a kind of allegorical theme, at least going by the title.

To close out Sarah Drinan's amazing painting sort of in the vein of James Gleeson, a painter of last century. Instead of a male view though here (see below) we have a woman's view in a similar vein. I mean I am not insisting on this interpretation, and sometimes comparisons are not useful. But in this case I think there is a good reason to point to precedents.