Acrylic Runner Up 2026

Gordon Dalton

The Stranger

Jackson's Art Prize 2026
Acrylic
Canvas
30.5 x 25.5 cm

“My painting focuses on places of personal importance on the North East coast. The work contains a slow chorographic mapping of an everchanging landscape that is shackled by its past and unsure of its future. Familiar motifs and half remembered memories are buried amongst doubt, cliché and the ancient and modern ruins that dot the skyline.

The paintings are critical and celebratory of these places, viewed equally with disdain and affection. They reverberate between a familiar and a strange apprehension of this haunted land, acting as ‘parafictions’ about place attachment. They are portals to another time in the past, present or future where a slow violence is inflicted upon these landscapes.

My paintings want everything to be alright but are acutely aware that this is not the case. They contain the essence of these landscapes and the melancholy of longing and wanting to belong. An unfashionable romanticism grounded in the act of painting.”