When the winning paintings from the national competitions started to arrive and were unpacked at Winsor & Newton headquarters in London in Spring 1999 in preparation for the international judging, there was surprise at the diversity of subject matter represented. As expected, there was a good spread of landscapes in all weathers and seasons from around the world, depicted in a variety of styles: a beaver pond in Canada, mountains in China, the rainforest in Ecuador, forests and lakes in Sweden, a panoramic view of the Polish countryside. Equally, the natural world and its wildlife featured: wild swans in Finland, fish in the Aegean Sea, sponge life off the Australian coast. 
Stanislaw Zoladz’s painting In the Drizzle (Cat.217) won second prize in the international competition and is a particularly fine example of these categories of painting. It reveals the extraordinary natural beauty that lies in the ordinary, a beauty which many passers-by might not notice. His super-realistic representation of a piece of coastline in Sweden on a rainy day is characterised by outstanding watercolour technique and a carefully balanced composition, which instil the picture with calmness and harmony. The lapping of the water and its eddying along the shore, the slate greys and rust browns, the contrast of round shapes with sharp edged ones, and of large with small, are all beautifully described. Symphony of Rust by Lok Kerk Hwang of Singapore (Cat.187) is a similarly impressive painting on the hidden beauty that is there for us all: this time it is revealed in a pile of rusting wheels, axles, and other iron debris the artist has spotted in a scrapyard.
Many artists used the competition as an opportunity to express their deep concerns about what was happening to the environment, locally, regionally, and globally. Ernesto Aragón of Argentina depicts it with simple symbolism in his Wound in the Country (Cat.5), 
ripping his painting of a barren terrain and literally sewing it back together again. Robert Holcombe of Australia chose more hard-hitting imagery to register his disgust at the despoliation of the Australian landscape, likening it to a rape (Cat.10). 
Elements of his image of Mother Earth being violated relate to the work of Picasso and Francis Bacon, two of the 20th century’s greatest artist-commentators on the human condition and the bestial nature of man. The placement in the painting of the twisting and thrusting neck and head of the figure recalls the horse in the centre of Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica (1937), while the terrifying image of the scream recalls the centre section of Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). The two white upright fractures in Holcombe’s picture indicate the permanence of the damage being caused to the natural environment. It appears to be a terminal process fuelled by business interests, represented by a bubble talk sign enclosing a dollar symbol in the detritus spilling from Mother Earth’s womb. Other symbols include dotted lines representing highways and a band-aid plaster to denote a temporary repair and a cover-up. The artist states plainly: ‘I am for preserving the planet. Australia along with the rest of the world is slowly destroying it’.
