José Luis Corella wins BP Portrait Award 2015 Visitors' Choice Award

 Winner of the BP Portrait Award 2015 Visitors' Choice
'Juanito' by José Luis Corella
(the portrait on the right of the above photo)
oil, 100cm x 100cm
© José Luis Corella | Photo © Katherine Tyrrell

'Juanito' by José Luis Corella has won the BP Portrait Award 2015 Visitors' Choice and continues the public's obsession with "big head" paintings with lots and lots of detail.

Corella's large portrait of his uncle received 1,860 votes (9.15% of the total vote) and was the clear winner by some margin.

‘I wanted to show the depth of the frustration of growing old and the solitude of the interior life he now lives.’

You can see more drawings of his elderly relative on his website and view a video of the portrait being painted below

José Luis Corella studied sculpture and drawing at Escuela de Artes Aplicadas y Oficios Artísticos de Valencia and the Facultad de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia. He previously exhibited in the BP Portrait Award in 2008 and 2009.

This is his blog

The Vote

When you have a painting in an exhibition which gets more than 0.25 million visitors (the visitors in 2014 totalled 281,717) you can be sure that getting a Visitors' Choice Award counts for something.

Of course not everybody votes. Between 18 June and 7 September, 20,312 votes were cast during the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. People could vote via screens outside the exhibition and on the website.

Second and Third Places

The irony is that Michael Gaskell has taken yet another second place!  I voted for Eliza and hoped he might win the prize outright this time - but it was not to be.....  The portrait got 1,293 votes (6.3% of the total vote)

So that's four BP Portrait Award second places and one(?) second place in the Visitors' Choice Award....

Eliza and Michael Gaskell at the Awards Ceremony - where he won the Overall 2nd Prize
now also winner of the Visitors Choice 2nd Prize
Acrylic on board
© Michael Gaskell | Photocopy © Katherine Tyrrell

Third Place went to David Jon Kassan who won third place in the 2014 BP Portrait Award.  His portrait got 1,156 votes ( 5.7% of the total vote)

Portrait of Sam Goldofsky, Survivor of Auschwitz (2015) by David Jon Kassan
Oil on acrylic mirror
© David Jon Kassan | Photo © Katherine Tyrrell

The BP Portrait Award Tour

The exhibition closed at the NPG yesterday and now moves to:

• Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (10 Oct 2015 – 28 Feb 2016) 
• Ulster Museum, Belfast (11 Mar –12 Jun 2016)

BP Travel Award Exhibition

The BP Travel Award exhibition also travels to Edinburgh and Belfast. I've very conscious that I've not yet edited a very long video interview with Edward Sutcliffe, the winner of the BP Travel Award 2014 - and will be sorting this out this week, ready for the tour of the exhibition to Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

(Note: I plead bereavement as an excuse. June was a bit much this year - with the death of a much loved cat happening on 1st June following three months of illness)