BP Portrait Tour & Portrait of the Nation

The 2009 BP Portrait Award Exhibition has now closed at the National Portrait Gallery. The 56 portraits in the exhibition are now on tour and if you live in the south of England or Scotland I recommend that you try and catch the exhibition at:

• Southampton City Art Gallery, Civic Centre Commercial Road Southampton: 28 September – 29 November 2009. This is the Exhibition's first ever visit to this gallery.
  
• Dean Gallery of the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh: 12 December 2009 – 28 February 2010

Peter Monkman and his daughter Anna and
Changeling 2
winner of the BP Portrait Award 2009
photo copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The exhibition ranges between intimate and personal images of friends and family to revealing portraits of celebrity sitters and presents a variety of styles and approaches that together illustrate the vitality of contemporary portraiture. I'd certainly recommend that anybody aspiring to enter the BP Portrait competition should try and visit the exhibition.

I've started to get a lot of visitors to this blog looking for details of the competition for the 2010 BP Portrait Award. These will be published on this blog just as soon as they are available. Last year online entry for the competition opened on 15 December 2009. This link also provides details of last year's competition.

If you want to enter the BP portrait Award in 2010 you can register on the BP Portrait Awards website and you'll get an email when the call for entries opens.

The Award is open to everyone aged 18 and over in recognition of the outstanding and innovative work currently being produced by artists of all ages working in portraiture.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the BP Portrait Award in recent years you might like to read past posts on this blog - about entry, exhibitions and trends - which you can find in BP Portrait Award - blog posts

If you do you might end up as an anecdote on this blog! The is a story from my blog post about the 2008 Awards Ceremony

One final anecdote.

I was introducing myself to Peiyuan Jiang and his partner and told him the name of this blog. At which point, he beamed at me and told me that he knew all about my blog and had read my previous blog posts about the BP Portrait Award after he failed to get his entry into the exhibition last year! At which point I beamed back at Peiyuan Jiang. :D

So there you go - read my blog posts on the BP Portrait Award (see below) and you too may end up learning something useful to your advantage!
Craig Wylie wins BP Portrait Award 2008 (a tale from the Awards Night)

Portrait of the Nation

If you live in Scotland it's also well worthwhile keeping an eye on Heads Up (nice title!) the new Portrait of the Nation blog created by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to provide behind the scenes details of what's happening while the gallery is closed.

The gallery closed in April 2009 for a major refurbishment and is due to reopen in 2011.

You can also:

• read about the Portrait of a Nation project
• see photographs about Portrait of a Nation on Flickr
• see the National Galleries of Scotland Commons' photostream on Flickr
  
• sign up for the Portrait of the Month feed. It will focus on one portrait for each month during the gallery’s two and half year closure and offers the opportunity to explore the breadth and wealth of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection .