Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize

I'm not quite sure how I managed to miss the introduction, calls for entries and various videos about the NEW London Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize - which offered a £10,000 prize for artwork about London. 

Until I started to investigate how it was promoted that is....

27th October 2017 - The article announcing the award of the prize to Helen A Pritchard

People introducing new art prizes generally write to me early on, especially if they offer £10,000 prizes as that's my basic threshold for taking art prizes seriously and writing about them.

However I guess if you are the Evening Standard you reckon that you can survive without me! ;)

However, speaking personally, I only read the Evening Standard periodically and despite having various ways of picking up news about new art prizes I totally missed anything about it.

Plus my many readers also tend to tell me about things they've read about or seen and also tell me about them and ask when I will be writing about them. However nobody wrote to me about it.

So below is a summary of what my understanding is of what happened for those who might be interested should they repeat the exercise - which is unclear as I can't find any one website which provides information.

Number of Entries - just 200!

Before I start, I'd like to make the very important point that 200 entries - which is what they say they got - is about 10% of what I would expect for a serious art prize in the UK. 

Let's be very generous and call it 20% of the sort of size of entry art prizes with a serious first prize get.

As a result I did lots of interrogations of Google to find references to the Call for Entries - and could find nothing other than the Evening Standard posts.

I did find a reference to it on the Evening Standard Facebook Page for Reader Offers - but absolutely no comments on it. 

Then I did a search on Facebook and found incredibly few references to it. (Art Competitions with serious prizes generally generates lots of activity on Facebook - lots of likes and lots of comments. This one did neither)

So I can only conclude that the marketing machinery didn't know WHO to contact to get coverage in terms of artists reading about this great opportunity.  There are listings of people who get told about art competitions - I know I'm on it and I get told about lots - but draw a line in relation to what I will cover. I would have covered this one - if I'd ever been told about it!

So whatever else we can say about this prize, it's not difficult to conclude that:

• getting the message out about this prize FAILED
• the art competition could have had very many more entries if it had organised itself and promoted it rather better than it did
• The Evening Standard is not enough to promote an art prize and get a serious entry!

Bottom line if I was Hiscox, who were sponsoring the prize, I'd be pretty disappointed.

What happened when and where

What we have are:

• a webpage for the London Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize - which isn't a page with information. 
• It's just a Topic Page on the Evening Standard website with lots of links to other URLs which focus on the pictures rather than what they are all about. 
• There are no words and 
• no Editorial input of "want to find out more - read this". I'm now becoming less confused as to how come I missed it.....
• 27 April 2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Artists can win £10,000 for putting London on canvas (8 shares) - Note the number of shares! There are a few details about who can enter (open to UK residents aged 18 and over) and the prize - and then it says To find out more and enter the London Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize, go to standard.co.uk/artprize - which takes is back to my first link above - which is sadly missing all the normal information for entering a prize e.g. like the deadline for entries!  The only links which look remotely like they might lead to the information about how to enter lead back to the article above - which doesn't say a single word about "how to enter". Am I missing something? Have I found found out why there are so few entries?

They will be given “London” as their brief and asked to submit a painting with the winning work, chosen from a shortlist, announced at an event at the National Gallery on October 26.

• 28 June 2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Get inspired by these famous paintings of London - a very nice article highlighting a number of paintings of London done previously by artists at different times and in different styles. Still no sign of any details of how to enter. It finishes To find out more about the prize, which closes on September 24, go to standard.co.uk/artprize and guess which page we're back to!  
• 5 July 2017- Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Turner actor picks up his own paintbrush for our £10,000 prize - Not sure about the market segment analysis which informed this article - as in I'm not too sure this is the sort of marketing which is really going to engage with the professional artist and art student community!
• 17 August 2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Where to learn to paint in London - Great idea but it's a VERY incomplete list of places where people can learn to paint. Do these people KNOW where the art schools are in London?  Again the link is back to the page with no information about how to enter. Has it been changed since the art competition closed? Did it ever have any information?  Where did the people who entered get their information about what to do from?
• 18 September  2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Idris Khan signs up as a judge for £10k prize (7 shares)
• 22 September 2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Your last chance to enter for £10k prize - It mentions the deadline is soon - finally I've found out something about the deadline and what you can enter 2 days before the deadline!!!

If you’ll be putting the finishing touches to your work right until the final hour, make note that no entries will be considered after midnight this Sunday (September 24).
Entries cannot be bigger than 594 x 841 mm, and if shortlisted, need to be sent in for judging by October 16.

• 26 October 2017 - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: The shortlisted artists in the frame for £10k prize - Video of the Arts Editor of the Evening Standard at the offices of Hiscox talking about the competition. We see images of various artworks. There is no reference to what the title is and who the artist is. Very disappointing. Obviously this competition is all about the Evening Standard and Hiscox
• 27 October 2017 - there is an article announcing the winner - Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize: Helen A Pritchard's abstract 'love letter to London' wins £10k prize (144 shares) - The South African-born artist's painting beat over 200 other works to the £10k prize - another video with the announcement of who won the prize and why.  The event seems to be the sort where lots of people who know little about art drink Prosecco and talk to one another and pointedly ignore the art.  Then finally.... as I scrolled down the article I found a listing of the artists who got shortlisted for the prize (but no unique URL for the slideshow - which is a poor show!)

I couldn't find any reference to any exhibition - so no opportunities for sales which are often an important incentive to artists entering art competitions.

The shortlisted artists

Interestingly, MSN News provided a much more accessible overview of the shortlisted artists

So here is the list of those who got shortlisted - and as I usually do, the links in their names are to their websites if you want to see more of their work

• Wintery Waterloo Bridge by Christopher Green - who regularly produces hugely impressive and large scale ink drawings/paintings of London - and who won the £10,000 Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize this year. No prizes for guessing who I would have given the prize to!  I've been featuring his artwork on this blog for years!
• Wood Green by Katherine Lubar
• View from the Tate Modern by Kieran Luke Naish - Kieran won the first People's Prize of the Lynn Painter-Stainer's competition. The painting shortlisted for this competition also won the public vote at LPS
• Urban Concrete by Gail Seres-Woolfson - Gail graduated with a First Class Diploma in Fine Art from The Art Academy in July 2017 (i.e. one of the places which taught art mentioned in the July article)
• Trident Turf Wars – ES News Print by Robert Adam - obviously some deep meaning to this one which is inexplicable to me
• To Make a Sculpture by Helen A Pritchard - the winner
• Thames Mudlark by Jackie Clark
• Shoreditch by Fabienne Jenny Jacquet
• Sand and Stone Waiting to be Something, Pudding Mill Lane by Emma Sophie Wilson
• Hand Car Wash, Salmon Lane by Doreen Fletcher who's probably the only artist other than Christopher who has produced a lot of paintings of London and about the East End - and I know the car wash in her painting as it's about a mile from where I live!

and finally......

I'd be very interested to hear from

• those running art schools or teaching art or art students in London re. whether you heard about this prize and/or encouraged people to enter.
• artists who did find out more about it - and where you found the information and what did it say.