Dave Sparkes

Sunshine Coast National Art Prize 2026 - Finalist

_{Image courtesy of artist.}

Dave Sparkes
NSW

Byrrill Creek
2026
Watercolour on paper
60 x 90cm

I’ve always looked at the landscape and imagined how it once was. It’s a kind of longing, almost melancholia about how things could still have been. Much of my work is done en plein air, and I slip easily into reverie, which reliably, transports me anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of years back in time.

Distilling the complexity of the landscape is key to my work, and this reducing of the world to its essential elements works in harmony with my reveries of past, since memory, or even just imagination, is itself a form of refining a place and time into a simplified vision. It’s almost a visual euphemism, a selected savouring of only the best parts of a time that may not have been as perfect as we remember. Painting in monochrome, and in particular sepia, enhances that feeling of memory, history and distillation.