George Kennedy (Class of 2013) Glover Prize finalist
Posted on April 7, 2025
When George Kennedy (Class of 2013) went through Friends’, he loved maths. He still loves maths. But it took only a couple of months of an Engineering degree at UTAS for him to realise he loved maths solely in the abstract. A switch to studying Economics only underlined that and – burnt out after two years of good marks but almost numbing indifference – he dropped out of university and took a full-time job at a service station in Howrah.
For about a year he worked the strange, solitary hours of a servo, and found himself with a lot of money and alone time for a 22-year-old. He started painting – it hadn’t been an interest at Friends’ – and successfully applied to UTAS art school. “I didn’t know any art history and I didn’t know what I was doing,” says George. “It was a big cultural shift. I loved it.”
Despard Gallery picked up George’s work towards the end of his Honours degree in 2021. Gallery manager Nathan Taylor, who’s also an artist, had been watching George’s work evolve since he tutored him in a first-year painting class; George’s style has moved from pure abstraction to the more realistic works he paints now. (His The Wreckage of Rokeby was a finalist in this year’s Glover Prize, the prestigious prize for landscapes.) “I anticipate that George’s work will continue to shift and change on a regular basis,” says Nathan. “It is this lack of complacency and willingness to explore uncharted creative territory that makes his work so exciting and sincere.”
While George’s artistic choices have changed, his subject matter has remained the same – the bush reserves and expanding suburbia of Hobart’s Eastern Shore. “Our bush reserves are changing and receding,” he says. “People dump rubbish in them and there’s a darker side. I’m trying to capture all the elements, good and bad.”
George, who came out as trans at 19, has always loved the bush. His favourite memories of Friends’ are the outdoor ed and weekend activities: kayaking trips down the Derwent, whitewater rafting, surfing, rock climbing and riding bikes along fire trails from Kunanyi/Mount Wellington to Dover. As an artist, he’s interested in the tension between Tranmere, where he grew up, and Rokeby, where he lives now – just 20 minutes apart on foot for him but starkly different socio-economically. One day, he walked through a clearing littered with abandoned cars; the tree in its middle was on fire. For the Glover he entered a luminous painting of 200 burnt-out cars, pushed into a pile, that he’d photographed in a Clarendon Vale paddock.
He’s currently working on a painting that plays on Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. “Being able to work intuitively, as George does, definitely comes with a degree of risk,” says Nathan. “There is never any certainty of what may happen in the studio. However, it also shows a lot of courage and makes sure the door remains always open to new possibilities and serendipitous creative outcomes.”
