The 5th annual RURAL magazine Jersey Landscape Awards for 2023 has been won by Ann Morgan for her painting Early Morning, Bouley Bay.
Runner-up was Celina Borfiga’s Icho Tower.
Third place went to Patrick Malacarnet for The red barn, Parish of St. Clement
The first prize was a cheque for £500, sponsored by BCR Law.
Second prize, sponsored by National Trust for Jersey, was a free weekend for Le Catel Fort.
Third prize was a cheque for £150 from BCR Law.
The judging for this competition is separate from the main Summer Exhibition of the CCA Galleries International. The judges were David Benest, senior partner at BCR Law; Donna Le Marrec, the marketing manager of National Trust for Jersey;
Tom Parker for CCAI Gallery; Gary Grimshaw and Alasdair Crosby for RURAL magazine.
Thanking the judges and sponsors for their help in selecting the winning works of art, RURAL’s editor Alasdair Crosby said that the remit of the competition remained unchanged: it was to choose the best of the entries that celebrated the rural landscape of the Island, its history, its present, its future.
He added: ‘I have to say that most days I am out with my dog having our joint daily exercise in the Island’s countryside and I see countless beautiful rural views, which, if I had the talent, I would attempt to paint. I don’t have that talent, but there are many people here this evening who do, so it would be great if, in future years, a greater amount of the Island’s beautiful countryside could be captured by artists than has been the case this year.
‘Perhaps greater than ever, the eyes of developers – or those that benefit from development – are viewing fields that are unused, with a view to buying them up and sitting on them, leaving them unfarmed, if need be, waiting for the moment that planning regulations are changed and they become potentially suitable for building development.
‘The effect of this is that more land will be transferred to become the property of fewer, wealthier people – which is an unhealthy trend in itself. It was the author GK Chesterton, who writing about capitalism in the early years of the 20th Century, said that we don’t need fewer capitalists, we need as many of them as possible – a sentiment that is easily applicable to land and land ownership.
‘So an exhibition like this reminds us of the corners of the Island that are still ‘rural’ in character and a recollection of what we could so easily lose, through greed, development – or sheer absent mindedness.’
