Tasmanian-based artist Nicholas Blowers wins the Glover Prize 2024

Hobart artist Nicholas Blowers has claimed the coveted, $75,000 acquisitive honour with his oil on canvas painting Lake Bed.

The self-described realist painter earned Australia's most sought after landscape art prize for his rendering of the South-west Tasmanian reservoir Lake Gordon, which he's depicted in dry and "blasted" detail.

Blowers is no stranger to The Glover - he's been a finalist eight times, winning highly commended and people's choice categories twice - but 2024 is his first win.

"It's a gift to win it, it's fabulous," Blowers said.

"It's feast or famine sometimes when you're an artist, and I am very, very grateful."

The artist, who was born in Essex in the United Kingdom and has lived in Hobart since 2007, said his winning painting was inspired by a trip to Lake Gordon in 2015 when the water-level at the reservoir had fallen 45-metres, revealing a "drowned forest".

"It's a grittier, darker sort of realism, the kind I'm always drawn to," Blowers said.

"This place was almost a memorial of a memorial, a tree portrait that resonated with me because everything was blasted and shredded and that was the mark we left on the landscape."

Blowers said his painting style is one of capturing "collapsing, decaying natural environments" - Lake Bed is in that exact vein: the composition depicts hundreds of rotting trees on Lake Gordon's cracked and flaking bed with a red-tinted sky above.

"I find beauty in unconventional places; it's like asking whether a fungal bloom can be as beautiful as a vase of flowers - it can be," he said.

"And Tasmania I think that is present, because for me it holds so many strange wonders, so many forms.

Lake Bed is "brutal but also beautiful', and was inspired by the apocalyptic World War I battlefield paintings of Paul Nash.

"There's a combination of realism and grittiness with this work," Glover Prize judge Ralph Hobbs said.

"It's an artist who knows how to manipulate light and tone and also tell a story, which is that of the Tasmanian landscape.

"It is at once repelling and compelling - the artist leads us into a place of strange and melancholy beauty, and like all great works of art, it begins a conversation about what it is to live in a place and our responsibilities to it."

Lake Bed was chosen as an exemplary representation of the Tasmanian landscape and handpicked by Mr Hobbs and other judges Mary Malcuhy and Malcolm Bywaters from a record-breaking 740 artists from across Australia and overseas.

"I'm always surprised by the difference between the [winner] compared to the year before," said Megan Dick, the Glover Prize exhibition's curator.

"Each artist brings their own individual experience into their work and paints a particular view they have connected with. The judges took a long and considered time to select the winner and they were unanimous.

"What stands out with Nicholas Blowers' work is that it is a landscape you cannot view any more; there is uniqueness in that and it is also beautifully painted."

The Glover Prize exhibition - held in Evandale's Falls Park Pavilion - is open to the public from Saturday, March 9, until Sunday, March 17.