A PAINTING featuring Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant was awarded Tasmania's leading prize for landscape painting yesterday.

Sydney artist Rodney Pople, who won the $35,000 Glover Prize, defended his controversial painting saying that as an artist he saw it as his role to sometimes bring issues up that were uncomfortable, the Hobart Mercury reports.

"There are too many artists just doing things for the market and I tend to want to do work that has a bit more of an edge to it," he said.

Mr Pople said he was living in Sydney on April 28, 1996, when 35 people were murdered.

A Hobart detective, who spent 24 hours at the scene of the massacre and twice interviewed Bryant, is outraged over the art award.

Former Tasmania Police inspector John Warren said: "I can't comprehend how someone can be so insensitive to all the victims and people who have been scarred for life.

"They would be outraged and so am I."

Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority chief executive Stephen Large said that any publicity or images associated with Bryant were not helpful to those affected by the Port Arthur massacre.

Mr Warren said he found the painting totally outrageous, adding: "I think it is in very poor taste.

"He might be a good artist but he has shown no common sense."

Mr Pople said he was aware of how deeply hurt Tasmanians had been by the massacre.

But he defended Bryant's inclusion in the painting, explaining: "It is very much part of the imprint of the landscape of Port Arthur as much as the surreal beauty of the green fields, which were put in to camouflage the brutality of the whole place.

"Martin Bryant is not glorified in the painting he is very small and he's in there because he is part of the framework and footprint of the landscape but only in a very small scale.

"He is sort of fading into the distance compared to the power of the whole landscape but he is part of it. I am not in any way glorifying Martin Bryant but to ignore it is looking in the wrong way as well."

Chief judge Doug Hall said that raising the profile of the Glover Prize, which is sponsored by a hotel chain, was the last thing on the judges' minds.

The three judges had all agreed that the Pople painting was the best and not a gratuitous or provocative work.

Read more at The Hobart Mercury.

Originally published as When mass murder becomes high art