Fed: Visits to the Somme inspire winner of $20,000 art prize

AAP General News (Australia)
04-20-2010
Fed: Visits to the Somme inspire winner of $20,000 art prize

By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

SYDNEY, April 20 AAP - Europe's World War One battle sites provided the inspiration
for Tasmanian artist Raymond Arnold's winning entry in the $20,000 Gallipoli art prize.

"I can't quite understand the emotion that wells up within you," Arnold said after
being awarded the prize in Sydney on Tuesday.

"It's the most spiritual experience of my life.

"I have been walking, cycling and making my own artwork in those old battlefields for decades.

"It has been a quest into imaginative landscapes, spectral figures in foreign lands,
but in most respects they live here with us still."

The 59-year-old Queenstown artist's winning entry, The Dead March Here Today, had its
seeds in Will Longstaff's 1927 painting, Menin Gate At Midnight, which depicts the ghosts
of fallen WWI soldiers gathering at a memorial in Ypres.

The building in Arnold's evocative nocturnal scene is the cenotaph at Devonport in Tasmania.

He said the work attempted to draw a bond between normal daily life and the hard reality of war.

"It will remain long after I'm gone," Arnold said.

"It's my legacy to the viewer."

Arnold, who regularly visited the Somme while living on and off in Paris for 15 years,
had a grandfather who lost both legs to trench foot while serving in France.

"I grew up in the 1950s and 60s surrounded by men like that, including Japanese POWs,
who had been damaged by conflict," he said.

"I am carrying all that baggage, as so many people do.

"Everybody seems to have a story.

"There are hundreds of cenotaphs in Australia and New Zealand.

"The Devonport cenotaph could be any of them.

"It could contain any group of names that speak of great sacrifice and honour.

"They are sacred places."

The Gallipoli Art Prize, which started in 2006, is intended as a commemoration rather
than a celebration of war.

"It pays homage to those who stood up to defend their country when they were called,"

competition judge John McDonald said at the announcement in Sydney on Tuesday.

It is open to artists from Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.

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