Summer art exhibition attracts over 100 entries

More than 100 Otago artists feature in the Otago Art Society’s summer exhibition at the Dunedin Railway Station.

Society president Rose Shepard said the event was the first of its planned celebrations to mark its 150th year.

The exhibition opens today and runs until February 21.

It received close to 140 entries this year for the exhibition.

All of the society’s artists were welcome to enter their work and have it on display at the railway station.

A pastel rendition of a scene in West Plains, Invercargill, titled Summer Lane, by Lynn Grace, won the overall first place prize at the exhibition opening night yesterday.

Judge Inge Doesburg said the work evoked a summer lane quite beautifully.

"It is rendered with a lightness of touch and a build-up of pastel that makes the viewer feel you can smell the air and enjoy a stroll down the lane on a summer’s day."

Another category of the exhibition was "plein air" — French for "in the open air"— and referred to painting or drawing outdoors.

Another pastel drawing — Misty Orokonui, by Annelois Douglas — was first in that category.

Ms Doesburg said the immediacy of the mark-making in the drawing engaged the viewer to be directly involved in the scene.

"It feels as if we are sitting in the landscape and feel the wind shake the long grass, a movement that is evolving into abstraction or semi-abstraction, in which the sensation and the weather, the atmosphere and exposure to the landscape become visceral.

"The elements and the viewer merge." 

— Allied Media