Updated March 10, 2017 18:23:42

Queenstown artist Raymond Arnold has won Australia's richest landscape painting prize, a decade after his first win.

He took first prize with his landscape work La Barque de Dante/Macquarie Harbour Party Barge in the Australian annual art prize, awarded for paintings of the landscape of Tasmania.

Arnold said the Strahan party barge caught his eye as he was reflecting on his own mortality, and that of his friends and family.

"I've found a rather prosaic subject or motif for a completely profound concept of death of one's friends," he said.

Arnold first claimed the $40,000 prize in 2007 for his painting Western Mountain Ecology.

For a decade he ran the now-closed Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ) centre on Tasmania's west coast.

Photo: This is the second Glover prize win for Raymond Arnold. (ABC News: Laura Beavis)

He hoped winning for a second time would give renewed prominence to his work.

"Here I am after the 10-year life of my centre (LARQ) completed, and I've won the Glover again," Arnold said.

Glover Prize head judge Ben Quilty said Arnold's La Barque de Dante/Macquarie Harbour Party Barge immediately stood out, and the judges made a unanimous decision.

"You can feel the dark psychology of that work before you even know what it is, what this object is floating on a lake," he said.

"It almost looks like it's raining oil."

In its 14th year, the Glover Prize attracted a record 336 entries from Australia, the UK and Asia.

Photo: Judges Mary Knights and Ben Quilty finalised the short list and helped select the winner. (ABC News: Laura Beavis)

Quilty is best known for his work as an official war artist in Afghanistan and for mentoring executed drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran.

He said landscape painting could be no less controversial.

"It has to deal with all of the histories of what this landscape is, and a lot of those are pretty brutal and contested histories," he said.

"The best works in this show are about those contested histories."

Quilty said Glover's work continued to inspire.

"The way it deals with such relevant topics of the time, and [they are] still topics that are relevant," he said.

"Of course Glover is an artist that all contemporary artists in Australia are interested in."

The Glover Prize finalists will be on exhibition at Evandale's Fall's Park Pavilion over the March long weekend and again on March 18-19.

John Glover was a successful British painter and contemporary of Turner and John Constable, who emigrated to Tasmania in 1831.

Photo: There were over 40 finalists listed in the Glover Prize for 2017. (ABC News: Laura Beavis)

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, painting, visual-art, tas

First posted March 10, 2017 18:01:53