New English Art Club - Annual Exhibition 2020 (Part 2)

 This is the second half of my post about the the Annual Exhibition 2020 of the New English Art Club which continues at the Mall Galleries - theoretically until 16th December (except London goes into Tier 3 from Wednesday 16th December which means you have one day left to this exhibition in person - see this article by the Museums Association) 

Part 1 of this post can be found here - New English Art Club - Annual Exhibition 2020 (Part 1) - which highlights the links where you can see ALL the drawings, paintings and prints in the exhibition.

This post focuses on 

• prizewinners
• the exhibition overall
• the catalogue
• pics I particularly liked

Small works in the West Gallery

Prizewinners

The prizewinners are as follows. You can also 

• view this year's prize-winning works on the Mall Galleries website - but I'm not sure how long that page stays up after the exhibition finishes.  
• view prizewinners on the NEAC website - and I checked and you can still see their 2019 prizewinners on their website

Very oddly there's no link to the individual page for the artwork on either site.

Below you can see all the winning artworks - plus other work I liked - which included other paintings by prizewinners.

Chris Beetles Gallery Prize for Figurative Art

£2,500 for a non-member artist. Selected by Chris Beetles of Chris Beetles Gallery, St James's, London.

Hermione at Home by Lyn Gray (exhibited in the North Gallery)

Hermione at Home by Lyn Gray (SOLD)
oil, 45 x 34cm

"I had not been aware of the work of Lyn Gray before and on looking over her profile online find that my choice is not serendipitous. She has a lively and spontaneous way with paint and stimulates consistently one’s imagination by investing her subjects with distinct personalities.

'Hermione at Home’ is an artwork handled with dash and panache and skilfully rendered form. Lyn Gray has captured an element of personality in her sitter which arrests attention.

The artist shows us that Hermione is an old lady comfortable in herself and whose direct gaze interests and charms us. She is an enduring and strong image for our difficult times.” 

I'm not sure which profile Chris Beetles if referring to as I can't find a website - just a Saatchi site which artwork in various styles. It's a small work but one with bags of personality. It reminded me of all the old ladies - like my mother - who've been coping on their own at home during the pandemic

I note that Lyn Gray seems to have exhibited a few times at the Mall Galleries (2018 Pastel Society exhibition and also 2020; 2015 Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition and 2017) and all selected works are good.  It's often easy to miss artists showing a lot of promise when they try submitting to all those societies relevant to their work - simply because so very often only one work gets chosen.

I'd love to see the Mall Galleries acknowledging all those artists who are non-members but get regularly selected across different societies. Sometimes I feel as such artists should get a special membership of the FBA in recognition of their work across the societies and the years.

Slightly confusingly Hermione is not the sitter in the next award but rather the person behind the award.

The Hermione Hammond Drawing Award - Jen Looking Up by Merlin Bateman-Paris

£2,000 for a drawing by an emerging artist aged 35 or under

Jen Looking Up by Merlin Bateman-Paris (exhibited in the North Gallery)

This is a very striking drawing which looked good on the wall. I'm not however a fan of the marks and thumbprints around a charcoal drawing which could be cleaned off without detracting from the drawing itself

Jen Looking Up by Merlin Bateman-Paris

(Incidentally I have a problem with Merlin's website which is NOT responsive and hence all the images of his artwork are TOO BIG for my 27" screen. It needs sorting out.)

The Bowyer Drawing Prize

A prize of £1,000

Study for Bottles and Buildings by Jason Line (exhibited in the North Gallery)

Study for Bottles and Buildings by Jason Line

Charcoal on paper 72 x 55cm

I really liked this drawing - and had a long chat with a visitor about it. It's very skillfully done using charcoal - there is a terrific sense of depth and good use of perspective in both the traditional and aerial senses. In addition the translucence of the glass bottles is very accomplished - I've not sure if I've seen any drawings which have bettered this aspect in this quantity of glass bottles.

Jason graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art (Painting) 1984-7 from Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology. He has a track record of regularly being selected by art competitions for his drawings and paintings and has exhibited extensively.

He also has one of the more interesting Artist Statements I've ever read.

The Winsor & Newton Award

Art materials to the value of £500

Cardoons in a Kentish Garden by Ruth Stage NEAC (exhibited in the East Gallery)

Cardoons in a Kentish Garden by Ruth Stage NEAC

egg tempera, 56 x 64 cm (60 x 68 cm framed)

Ruth's paintings are always impressive and I like them a lot. I liked this - particularly the complimentary colours of acid yellow and shades of purple/mauve/grey but actually preferred her painting of Afternoon Surfers (in the West Gallery) - which is the current feature image on her website.

Ruth Stage studied at Newcastle University before a postgraduate course in painting at the Royal Academy Schools, graduating in 1995. She has exhibited extensively at many prestigious galleries in London and throughout the UK and won numerous awards for her paintings in egg tempera.

The Peter Ashley Framing Prize

Presented by The Artistic Framing Company: A bespoke handmade picture frame will be created for the winning artwork, to the value of £500

Self Portrait by Nicholas Baldion

Self Portrait by Bicholas Baldion
oil, 20 x 17 cm (35 x 32 cm framed)

The Dry Red Press Award

The winning work will be published as a greeting card in the Dry Red Press 'Prize Winners' range, with royalties from the sale of the cards going to the artist

Heleniums by Caroline Frood NEAC

You can hear Caroline Frood here

Heleniums by Caroline Frood NEAC

The Exhibition - and paintings I liked

It was a real pleasure to be able to get back in a gallery and view an exhibition. Perhaps because it was a very cold day when I visited last Monday, there were rather fewer people there. Except visitors picked up after lunch around about 2pm when lots of people started coming back in. From which I can only conclude if you want to visit in a near empty gallery, go at lunchtime!

I also saw quite a few red spots so obviously artwork has been selling - and I'd be interested to know how much was online and how much was generated by visitors to the exhibition. I'm assuming most sales were probably online given I got to the exhibition about an hour after it opened - and there was no PV in the normal sense of the term.

The exhibition was well hung in terms of themes and colours. As always most of the paintings are oil paintings, most of the drawings involve charcoal and all prints are via traditional methods.

I'm getting used to the dividers down the centre of the West Gallery rather than jutting out of the side walls - and in some ways I prefer it. 

It's certainly a very safe gallery to visit with a well marked one way system. 

Paintings I liked

This painting (below) of an artist at work in his studio - by figurative painter Tom Hughes - jumped out at me as soon as I entered the exhibition. I thought it well done in terms of topic, composition and execution. Obviously done from a photo - but why not. It's the only way you'd get the view!

Tom has been doing a lot of Artist Support Pledge work during the Pandemic which you can see on his website

His paintings have got a bit of a tendency to lean which is a bit unsettling - and I'm wondering it it's like my leaning of verticals which I don't notice until afterwards.

The Nest by Tom Hughes

As always the drawings in the NEAC Exhibition are both evident and typically strong.

I loved this painting of the Flat Iron and Fifth Avenue and Broadway in New York by NEAC President Peter Brown. Indeed I liked all his paintings - including the ones of his studio at different times of the day and in different light conditions.

Fifth Avenue and Broadway, The Flatiron, New York (SOLD)

Peter Brown PNEAC RP ROI PS Hon RBA

Oil , 20 x 91 cm (30 x 101 cm framed) 

Summer Morning Light, The Studio

Peter Brown PNEAC RP ROI PS Hon RBA

Oil, 122 x 51 cm (132 x 61 cm framed) 

£8,000

I also found this small panoramic work - Scullers, Thames by Charles Rake NEAC - to be very appealing. There's something about altering the view of a landscape so that you remove the normal horizon which seems to place you in a different world. It also felt somewhat Asian in some way - probably to do with the spacing of motifs and how they'd been divided up within the picture plane

You can see more of his artwork here - and it's obvious to me that he likes playing around with the boundaries of landscapes - especially in relation to pictorial space and the horizon.

I'm left wondering whether this painting is a reprise - with variations - of the one on his website - or a literal reworking. It doesn't matter which. I rather like the versions which come after the first effort.

Scullers, Thames by Charles Rake NEAC

Tart in the Kitchen by the award winning pastel artist Felicity House PS is yet another in the long running series of pastel drawings of recipes, food prep and general all round foodiness in the kitchen - which I just lOVE. Felicity has great skill in draughtsmanship and a very good sense about how much colour is needed and how to balance it in the picture.

Tart in the Kitchen 

Felicity House PS

Pastel 

54 x 67 cm (71 x 84 cm framed) 

Here's the painting by Ruth Stage which I indicated I liked a lot

Afternoon Surfers by Ruth Stage NEAC
Egg tempera, 100 x 120 cm (104 x 124 cm framed) 
£4,500

Also I very much liked this painting by Caroline Frood, another of the prizewinners. Indeed I liked it better than the one that won the prize......

Poppy Seedheads by Caroline Frood NEAC

Oil, 76 x 51 cm (87 x 62 cm framed) 

£2,800

The Catalogue

This year's catalogue was very nice - with a large full page pic for each member exhibiting.

I compared it to last year's and it was definitely an upgrade in terms of quality of catalogue and the quality of the images were as good as I'm sure they could be - bearing in mind they are starting in many instances with photos by artists who are not experts.

It's a pity that some of the dates of both events and advertising offers were out of date re the exhibition dates being changed three times - but I'm not sure what they could have done about this - except possibly had a paper insert?

Sometimes traditions continue past their 'sell by' date.  I note that very many of the members now list their studio address as ℅ an NEAC email address (i.e. GDPR prevents any art society supplying addresses without explicit and written consent of the member) - and I wonder what the value is of listing contact addresses. Surely most members would welcome the listing of website addresses instead? (With contact via NEAC for all those without a website)

NEAC Statistics 2020

I've not checked the stats yet - but might write a few more words if the number of non-members varies significantly from NEAC's very low percentage for an open exhibitiomn.