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Sydney landscape painter Idris Murphy has won the $20 000 2014 Gallipoli Art Prize with his painting ‘Gallipoli Evening’ depicting a lone tree in a golden landscape, inspired by his recent visit to Gallipoli. Murphy only recently discovered over 160 letters written by his grandfather Charles Idris Pike from the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front to his sweetheart Violet (who later became Charles’ wife).
Judges also commended Glen Preece for ‘Soldier – Flight to Heaven’ and Hugh Ramage for a painting of his friend titled ‘R.E. as a Digger’. The three paintings are amongst 37 finalist works that will be on display at the Gallipoli Memorial Club inSydneyfrom 23 April to 4 May.
Now in its 9th year, the annual Gallipoli Art Prize is awarded to the work that best expresses the Gallipoli Club’s ‘creed’ – “We believe that within the community there exists an obligation for all to preserve the special qualities of loyalty, respect, love of country, courage and comradeship which were personified by the heroes of the Gallipoli Campaign and bequeathed to all humanity as a foundation of perpetual peace and universal freedom.” Australian,New Zealandand Turkish artists are invited to interpret the creed as it relates to any armed conflict in which Australia has been involved.
Idris Murphy said his winning work was painted after spending some time in and around Gallipoli in May 2013. “I had been prepared for a certain degree of what might be called melancholy, however I was not expecting or prepared for this place of legends, to also be beautiful. This work, painted back in my studio is a response to that irony. ‘Evening’ is both a sense of actual time and a metaphor for that experience of the place.”
Idris Murphy (b.1949) from Caringbah in Sydney is a well-known landscape painter who has been exhibiting for more than 30 years. His grandfather, Charles Idris Pike, enlisted at age nineteen and served 1000 days of active service through some of the worst action of WW1 from 1914 to 1918. His recently discovered letters written from the battlefields provide an extraordinary and moving insight into a soldier’s life including the exchange of gifts across the trenches between Turkish soldiers and the Anzacs. Murphy will return to Gallipoli in April this year with a group of eminent Australian landscape painters (many of whom have also submitted paintings to the Gallipoli Art prize over the years) for a painting expedition and Gallipoli centenary project entitled ‘Your Friend the Enemy’.
“It’s appropriate, with the centenary looming, that this year’s Prize has been awarded to an artwork based on the first-hand experience of the battlefields of Gallipoli,” said one of the judges, critic and writer John McDonald. “The theme of the Gallipoli Art Prize also extends beyond the theatre of war to embrace those qualities we like to think of as somehow defining ‘Australian character’. The Gallipoli campaign played a big part in establishing these values. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure they do not degenerate into myths… If the Gallipoli Art Prize has a broader purpose it is to make us reflect deeply on our common humanity and hold fast to those beliefs that show national identity in the best possible light.”
One of the abiding aims of The Gallipoli Art Prize is to put together a collection of works to commemorate the heroes of the Gallipoli campaign and all those who have served and fought during the following century. This spirit extends to the Turkish soldiers who were the Anzacs’ opponents in 1915. The club sponsors a parallel version of the art prize every year in Turkey, honouring the ties of friendship that now unite former adversaries.
An exhibition of the 2014 Gallipoli Art Prize finalists will be open 10am-5pm Wednesday, 23 April – Sun 4 May, 2014 (except for Anzac Day & 30 April) at the Gallipoli Memorial Club,12 Loftus St, Circular Quay SYDNEY.
Image: Idris Murphy, Gallipoli Evening, 2013, acrylic and collage on board, 130 x 120cm
Courtesy the artist and King Street Gallery on William, Sydney
