2022 – Grace Garton
Born in 1964, Grace completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at the City Art Institute in Sydney and received a Diploma in Graphic Design at TasTAFE in nipaluna/Hobart. She worked for 27 years in Australia's animation industry as an in-betweener, props designer, character designer, layout artist and the head of a design department.
Grace has exhibited her artwork in many solo and group exhibitions in nipaluna/Hobart and Naarm/Melbourne. In the past ten years, she has operated a small art business with fabric dolls, paintings, prints and watercolours. Many of these artworks have sold worldwide. Grace has conducted art classes for adults and children in nipaluna/Hobart, Rosny and Rosebery.
Grace is represented by Despard Gallery in nipaluna/Hobart's Salamanca Place and is based in Rosebery.
2021 – Annette van Betlehem
Queenstown-based painter Annette van Betlehem has painted professionally since 2005, with over ten solo exhibitions and more than 25 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Annette has been a Glover Prize finalist in 2015, 2017 and 2021, and in 2012 was awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her paintings hang in collections in New York, The Netherlands, Italy, Parliament House in nipaluna/Hobart and elsewhere in Australia.
The West Coast region's extreme weather, lush and wild rainforest and geology are core themes in Annette's work. Over time, she has developed an organic, free-flowing technique of applying oil paint to canvas using 'anything but a brush' to replicate natural processes—water flowing through rock or moss, drifting mist, wind and minerals. Annette's paintings are heavily textured and highly representational of the atmospheric West Coast landscape.
In 1997, Annette founded Hunter Street Studios, a dynamic community art space that across its five-year journey hosted workshops, exhibitions and classes and saw 180 graduates in photography, painting and ceramics. In 1990, Annette was a founding member of the Abt Railway Society whose work resulted in the initial $20m federal funding to restore the railway into one of Western lutruwita/Tasmania's iconic tourism experiences, the West Coast Wilderness Railway.
2020 – David Fitzpatrick
David Fitzpatrick is a Queenstown person who has worked in the depths of the Mt Lyell mine and has travelled and lived abroad before returning to the West Coast in 2015. His artwork references these origins with paintings and sculptures made using materials and processes that are highly representative of the landscape and mining industry. David created a new two-dimensional artwork representative of Queenstown by focusing his unique industrial method on a piece that represents the mountain that stands sentinel over the town, Mt Owen.
'Materiality is key in my work—working with industrial materials, I incorporate the residue from the copper-producing process, the slag metals and local clay', said David. 'There is a robust quality that I am attracted to, these materials are of this place and represent our history of intrusion to the elements of this environment.'
2019 – Joh Osborne
In 2019, West Coast artist and painter Joh Osborne was awarded the second $5000 acquisitive West Coast Artist Commission. Her paintings are abstract snapshots of animal and human behaviour, letting her intuition guide her brush strokes through a series of mark making, expressing her journey living on the West Coast through paint on canvas.
The landscape, bugs, birds, animals and people that inhabit the West Coast of lutruwita/Tasmania create the backdrop to Joh’s paintings. The ghost of the Tasmanian Thylacine has been her most recent focus, the thought of them being around is very possible in Joh’s eyes; mysteriously hiding in a cave somewhere snacking on a juicy native rat. The Thylacine represents the wild untamed West Coast that she calls home.
2018 – Chris Wilson
In 2018, West Coast artist Chris Wilson who specialises in pastels, was awarded the prestigious West Coast Artist Commission after being chosen amongst a highly-competitive field of applicants.
Chris first came to live on the West Coast in 1976 and is well-known for her bespoke gypsy caravan that has resided across the region over the years. Now based in Queenstown, Chris’s interest and artistic focus have shifted from rainforest and coastal environments to the immense, raw ‘geoscapes’ in the local area.