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Winner of the £5,000 Derwent Art Prize for Pencil Art
Chrys Allen for her pencil artwork Walk in Progress: Koli
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Last night Chrys Allen won the First Prize of £5,000 in the inaugural Derwent Art Prize competition for works created in pencil.
The Private View and Prizegiving was very well attended. It was very good to see a lot of young faces among the artists who attended last night. Nobody knew who had won so we had a few gasps as the announcements were made!
This post also covers a review of the exhibition in the North Gallery at the Mall Galleries.
Derwent Art Prize 2013 - The Selector's Award - Prizewinners
Three works were chosen by the selectors to win valuable cash prizes. The selectors were:
“It's been an interesting process helping to select approximately 90 works from an international entry of nearly 3600 pieces. The resulting exhibition is made up of what we considered to be the best works submitted by both professional and amateur artists. The show demonstrates a flourishing interest in drawing from a wide range of starting points. I look forward to this open competition going from strength to strength in future years.”Yvonne Crossley
I understand that the judges were able to judge works based on larger images than those seen online by people voting for the People's Choice award
In his preamble to the presentation last night, Professsor Stephen Farthing made some key points:
- all the judging was done digitally. It's the way most art competitions are moving given that it saves an extraordinary amount of expense for both the competition organisers and the entrants.
- all the work in the gallery looked the way it did on the computer screen. Judges were delighted to see there was no mismatch between what they thought they had selected and the artwork in the exhibition
- all artwork was anonymous in the judging process. As Professor Farthing revealed, when you're having to look through 3,000+ entries it's very difficult to get interested in a name! It's simply not relevant to the process of selection.
- each judge had a "judge's choice". While there was very little disagreement about what was OK and what should be selected it was also important that each Judge was able to exercise a little "eccentricity" - and hence each had one work which was their choice alone.
"I think it's a fantastic exhibition of drawings"Professor Stephen Farthing
- entrants should continue to submit drawings to art competitions. He felt that the calibre of some of the drawings submitted to the competition exceeded those he sees submitted to the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition! He had a very positive feeling about the quality of a lot of the work exhibited.
I have to say I agree - it is a very impressive exhibition of drawings - which is also well hung. Certainly one which should be visited by all those who aspire to pursue drawing in their career as an artist - or just to get selected for an exhibition like this.
The Derwent Art Prize 2013 prizewinners are as follows. You can see the shortlist that the selectors drew up on
the home page of the website.
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Chrys Allen accepting first prize
with Professor Stephen Farthing.
She gave a very inspiring speech! |
This artwork is 10 metres long and has been created on a long scroll of paper. I'm afraid I forgot to ask her how you get a scroll of paper 10m long!
One must also not be distracted by thoughts of the stamina involved in completing work of this length as it's a very fine piece of art. Interestingly using a scroll for artwork recording a walk is returning to a very traditional way in which a trail used to be recorded by topographical artists in times past.
(I remember very vividly seeing one at the RA in 2007 - see BritArt in History - RA exhibits admirable collections of British drawings)
This work was on
my personal shortlist and I am very much of the opinion that it's a very worthy winner. I did wonder whether it might have won when I saw how the artwork was laid out in the gallery on Monday. I'm also very pleased to see pencil art being created in ways which might seem unusual to many pencil artists who aspire to better things. In my last post I commented about this work
Both works use an unusual way of presenting drawings which is not unfamiliar to those who view exhibitions for Drawing Prizes. Food for thought for those art societies who put on exhibitions in pencil media!
You can
see a video of the work on YouTube (9 minutes 10 seconds) - it takes you along the "walk in progress" amongst Finnish Landscape as evidenced by the drawing in pencil. It was done while Chrys was Artist in Residence in Koli, North Karelia. Finland.
[Note: Walk in Progress : Towpath is a later one which the one I wrongly identified as the winning work until corrected by Chrys! Also worth watching.]
Personally, I would have liked to see the artwork displayed alongside the video. The Drawing Bursary awarded by NEAC has certainly had video displays of an artwork in exhibitions at the Mall Gallery before now. While obviously the pencil artwork needed to be given prominence, it would have been great to see the video in the gallery as well. Maybe on an iPad on the wall? This mode of display is often used now in other galleries to display multiple images. The question is whether the artist or the gallery supply the iPad!
Chrys Allen is a practising professional artist and art tutor. She lives and works in South East London. Instead of a garden, Chrys has a converted Victorian jam factory/warehouse which is used as her studio and also as an exhibition space and venue for performances and workshops during local arts festivals. Chrys also works as a visiting tutor and workshop leader.
Her enjoyment of and enthusiasm for drawing was very evident in her very lucid and inspiring speech which she gave last night on being presented with her first prize. I can only surmise that those who have Chrys as their tutor are very lucky students!
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