Painted loneliness

Christchurch-born painter Euan Macleod has won the 2009 Gallipoli Art Prize, a prize valued at $20,000 for Smoke/Pinklandscape/Shovel which portrays the muddy trenches of World War I. Competition judge John McDonald said: “This year, as in previous years, many artists chose to depict soldiers and scenes of battle. But Macleod’s work succeeds by suggestion and understatement. The shovel leaning against a wall of earth is a lonely, solitary symbol of the drudgery that accompanies the bloodshed and sorrow of war.” Macleod, who won the Archibald Prize in 1999, the Sulman Prize in 2001 and the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 2006, said he had always been intrigued by war sites. “I guess my work has always been about the figure in the landscape, in this case the shovel, and the loneliness of battles: not always physical battles, but life’s battles,” he said. Born in 1956, Macleod completed a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) at Canterbury University in 1979. He moved to Sydney in 1981.