A painting of the coastline around Otago Harbour populated by macabre medieval demons and dragons has won the Paramount Award in last night's annual Wallace Art Awards. Auckland painter Roger Mortimer, 58, was presented with the award at a ceremony at Pah Homestead by Auckland Mayor Len Brown.
The Wallace Art Awards, supported by patron Sir James Wallace for 23 years, have a total prize package of more than $195,000, mainly in the form of international residencies. The Wallace Arts Trust received 524 entries, with 90 entries selected as finalists.
Otago Harbour portrays an angel hovering over the east coast, with a demon perched above a naked group of people emerging from hell and a dragon devours a man in the sea at St Clair Beach. The figures originate from a 14th century manuscript of Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy. The award gives Mortimer a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York.
"I have been populating the New Zealand coastline with flotsam and jetsam over the years," said Mortimer, a former primary school teacher and counsellor who joined the Te Toi Hou (Maori arts programme) at Elam School of Fine Arts in 1995 and had his first solo exhibition in 2000. He plans to visit libraries and museums in the United States during his residency.
Elam senior lecturer Ruth Watson won the Fulbright-Wallace Arts Trust Award, for her work Telluric Insurgencies, a painted mannequin. She receives a three-month residency at the Headlands Centre for the Arts in San Francisco. Other winners include Auckland sculptor David McCracken, who was given the Wallace Arts Trust Vermont Award, a three-month residency at the Vermont Studio Centre in the United States, and Auckland artist Glen Hayward, who won a three-month residency at the Altes Spital in Solothurn in Switzerland.
