By his own admission, artist Joshua Andree feels like a kid who's been invited to sit at the adults table on Christmas Day.
The up-and-coming landscape painter, 30, has won the packing room prize and an honourable mention in the $100,000 Hadley's award for landscape art announced in Hobart on Friday.
Andree works out of a studio in Hobart's Sandy Bay and is one of several finalists whose work shows a fascination with the Tasmanian landscape and its contested histories.
"It's really great to be a young artist here in Tasmania that's contributing towards that conversation," he said.
His painting Once Still Water (Requiem for a Lake), is a melancholy scene of Lake Margaret on Tasmania's west coast, its dark tones broken by orange paint representing acidic pollution from mining.
The lurid underpainting is no mere conceit, with the oil-on-linen work also a commentary on the toxic legacy of historic mining near Queenstown.
A river in the area runs orange because of chemicals exposed by a century of mining at nearby Mt Lyell.
The operations have left vast areas of sulphide-rich rock exposed to water and air, forming sulphuric acid, which then leaches metals that discolour the water system.
The painting is an act of remembrance for the lake and what has happened in the area, the artist said.
"I like to look at these places as quiet places, but the quiet can sometimes be deafening," he said at a viewing of finalist paintings at the weekend.
The painting is framed by reused King Billy Pine, from the same wood pipes used to pump water from the lake to the nearby hydroelectric plant.
Artist Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan won the overall $100,000 prize ahead of a field of 30 finalists, with her artwork Ngayuku Ngura (My Country).
"My painting is connected to the Tjukurpa (ancestral stories) that I know, but also my paintings are an extension of who I am, and how I interpret my place in the world,” she said.
Her dot painting in tones of red and purple features an expansive arc across the large canvas, a design connected to the ancestral stories of the vast Yankunytjatjara lands, part of the APY lands in South Australia.
Another finalist work, Joe Whyte's Through the Clouds, also trades on a sense of isolation, of the kind that can be found in a city.
It shows a deserted Melbourne street in fading light, a location Whyte passes by every week.
"Even when there are people around, it can feel somewhat melancholy as the darkness creeps up on the old architecture," he said.
Having visited France to paint street scenes there, the artist realised that while he was improving his skills with the brush, he lacked any emotional connection to the places he was painting.
So he turned to the streets of suburban Melbourne, and has spent the past five years observing and sketching the streets of his city, to make art out of the everyday.
"The more time you spend, the more you pay attention to the people... and you really start to feel the emotion," he said.
The artworks are on display at Hadley's Orient Hotel in Hobart until August 20.
AAP travelled with the assistance of Hadley's.
