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| Winner of the £6,000 Bath Prize for 2011: Magpie in George Street by Chris Dunn watercolour, 75cm x 48cm copyright Chris Dunn |
Chris Dunn has won the £6,000 First Prize for a painting that best captures the spirit of the City of Bath in 2011. Here's Chris on his blog - Chris Dunn Illustration / Design - announcing his win
Tonight the Bath Art Prize Winners Were Announced...And I was the shocked to discover I received first prize!! Below is the winning piece. You can view my progress by visiting my previous post (click here).Chris has had a very good year having also been selected as a finalist for the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2011. Here's his review of that competition.
How the Bath Prize Competition works
This is the third year of The Bath Prize. The competition is open to professional and amateur painters at all levels and has been designed to produce a multi-faceted portrait of a very special city.
The Bath Prize requires entrants to produce at least one painting related to a specified location in the Georgian heart of Bath. The locations offered to each artist are allocated by ballot.
Artists are then encouraged to work on the streets, en plein air - which means they are seen by people visiting Bath, and that reinforces they notion that Bath is a city worth looking at!
However they can also sketch or photograph their subject and complete the work elsewhere.
Entries, Exhibition, Prizewinners and an Auction!
Altogether 250 artists submitted 394 entries this year.
Of these 158 works (that's 40%) were selected for judging. You can view the selected entries in the Gallery on The Bath Prize website - click an image to see a much larger image.
I took a quick trot through the images and these popped up as being the images I stopped at and looked some more. Take a look at:
- Christopher Draper - Doric House - plein-air - a classic watercolour to go with classic architecture in very classy city! I also liked his Roman Baths - that's not the perspective you expect! Christopher specialises in architectural illustration
- Adrian Sykes - Sunday - this painting spoke to me of an artist who is very comfortable distorting the perspective slightly to make you look. Adrian is a very experienced painter of urban scenes.
- Jane Riley has won the Farrow and Ball Prize for The Mural Painter - and I can see why. It stopped me in my tracks before I realised it had won a prize.
- Early evening, Sion Hill Allottments (plein air) by Andrew Taylor (My Plein-Air Painting Gallery) caught my eye when it was just a small thumbnail. I shall be adding his blog to the blogroll on The Art of the Landscape!
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| Early evening, Sion Hill Allottments (plein air) by Andrew Taylor |
- Abbey Green by Agata Duda appeals to the lover of odd perspectives in me. Agata is an Illustration student of the University of Gloucestershire based in Cheltenham
- I liked this "cut out" illustration of Bath with no name by Liam O'Farrell who also had two paintings of allotments selected for the RA Summer Exhibition in 2011. More excellent paintings on his website. I really like his website - very well laid out and easy to find his work but wish he'd put his blog on a proper blogging platform with an RSS feed to make it easier to follow.
- Southgate Place by Oliver Hurst is very pleasing although seems to belong to a bygone age.
- I like it when people take the trouble to record the aspects of a place which aren't actually set in stone. On the way to Bath Rugby Home Game by Adebanji Alade is one such painting.
- Guinea Lane and Lansdown Panorama by Glyn Davies is just "very Bath" to me. Glyn won the very first Bath Prize.
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| Guinea Lane and Lansdown Panorama by Glyn Davies |
- The Bridge by Maureen Davies by looks very loose in its mixed media treatment but the basic structure and perspective of the bridge is spot-on!
- Here's another take by Denis Roxby Bott of the same bridge - Pulteney Bridge (plein air)
The full catalogue can be viewed online at www.wessexauctionrooms.co.uk. Bids will be accepted online via The Saleroom website. See An Auction of Original Paintings relating to the City of Bath being selected entries from The Bath Prize - 155 Lots. Each of the paintings has an estimated value listed along with an image of the painting.
The Prize Funds in 2011 totalled £14,000. Prizes were awarded as follows:
- Bath Prize (£6,000) - Magpie in George Street, watercolour by Christopher Dunn, from Calne.
- First runner up (£2,000) - The Mural Painter, Farrow & Ball by Jane Riley from Batheaston.
- Second runner up (£1,000) - The River Avon below Pulteney Bridge, mixed media by Maureen Davies from Fordingbridge.
- Circus Prize (£1,250) - The Circus, watercolour by Alan Reed from in Ponteland, Northumberland.
- Farrow and Ball prize - The Pump Room, Farrow and Ball by Victoria Gamberoni from Bath.
- Interior Prize - Brasserie Gerrard watercolour by Paul Weaver from Bristol.
- Plein Air prize - Damp start, Guildhall by Peter Cronin from Glamorgan.
- The Guildhall prize
- Peter Cronin
- Jane Riley
- Paul Weaver
Promoting civic pride and artists
The art competition is sponsored by Future Bath Plus which is a joint initiative of the public and private sector in Bath
I have to say this is a very enterprising way of promoting both the city of Bath and urban landscape painters.
Would that more towns and cities took to promoting artists creativity in this way!
Note:
- Chris Dunn is a painter and illustrator who lives in Calne in Wiltshire. You can see more of his work on his blog and his page on the AOI Portfolios website
- Details of the Bath Prize 2012 will be announced on this blog in due course. This was submission information for 2011. Entries and initial submission of work is done online.
- website - http://www.thebathprize.co.uk
- Facebook Page - The Bath Prize
Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the exhibition when I went to see it on Saturday and I picked out the Jane Draper piece as being wonderful too. Several other paintings caught my eye, including Alan Reed's category winner. There' a short review on my blog.
ReplyDeleteThe winning piece is stunning!
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