Christa Zaat is rewriting art history for female artists

At the weekend I came across Christa Zaat for the first time - and found out how she was building a huge resource about Female Artists in History as a Facebook Page - which has 91,000 followers and a very high rating of 4.9 out of 5 by those who have reviewed the page.

Female Artists in History Facebook Page - with the wonderful painting by Rosa Bonheur as the banner 

She had shared an image relating to Maria Sibylla Merian the 17th century entymologist and botanical artist- and I commented that I had a major profile / resource page about her  (see About Maria Sibylla Merian)

Her response was that I was doing for my area (botanical art) what she was trying to do for female artists in history!

Christa Zaat

I then started to

• study her Facebook Page for Female Artists in History https://www.facebook.com/female.artists.in.history
• read her story (in this interview Rewriting History with Christa Zaat) and 
• discovered her project (she's the Cofounder and Virtual Curator) on Researchgate

The aim of this project is to give a voice to those female artists, that can't speak for themselves anymore. With this project I hope to get an extensive insight in how many female artists we have had in the past, which works they created, with who they collaborated, etc.

The introduction explains that the project is actually a joint project - and it's not just Christa on her own. Also how the resources is much more than just the very frequent posts about female artists. Check out the photo albums!

For the people who don't know the curators behind this page, we are Christa Zaat and Carel Ronk, living in The Netherlands.
We started this page on 20 April 2014, wanting to show the world all the talented and skilled women artists we hadn't heard about at school, but were certainly there. In 2015, we became a non profit foundation [Stichting Female Artist in History]
Since the beginning, we've been posting nearly 7000 posts per year. Each woman gets her own album, and in this moment we have nearly 2000 albums!. Over 4000 names are still waiting to be researched and added! So we have more than enough work for the next decade.

It's a really admirable project - and I'm amazed that it's taken me so long to come across it - but I shall now be a regular follower.

I've tried to do my own bit to raise awareness of women artists in history - but this endeavour by Christa is something else again.

I very much recommend all those interested in the art created by female artists in the past to read the interview on Rewriting History (see above link) and sign up to follow this Facebook Page.

Art World not immune to harassment and misconduct allegations

ArtForum reported and ArtNews asked awkward questions

It emerged this week that the art world is not immune to allegations of sexual misconduct / inappropriate behaviour. This post covers:

• the NEWS articles about the alleged misconduct by Knight Landesman, now an ex-publisher of ArtForum
• why it's more complicated than just misconduct
• why it's unlikely to be limited to one individual

At present, the ALLEGATIONS all seem to relate to one named individual who has been various described as

• a pillar of the international art scene, 
• a well-known and powerful figure
• a longtime publisher of Artforum magazine and a power broker in the art world
• a man-about-town known from the galleries of Manhattan to the Art Basel fair in Switzerland for his primary-colored suits and deep connections in the industry.
• accused of very Harvey Weinstein-like behavior 

Below are links to the newspaper articles which this week closely followed the accusations of alleged misbehaviour - after a complaint was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York accusing former Artforum publisher Knight Landesman of years of sexual harassment.

I've ordered them by

• general news titles and then art news titles
• the prominence of the publication and 
• the date order of the published articles

It's been difficult keeping up with who said what and when!  

However there is a much bigger picture about abuse of power which also needs to be highlighted - and the debate now seems to be moving in that direction........

BP Travel Award - Laura Guoke exhibits portraits from a refugee camp

Last year, The BP Travel Award 2016 was won by Lithuanian artist Laura Guoke. This year we can see the results of her efforts in terms of travel and portraiture in the BP Portrait Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London

Laura Guoke with her two portraits of people in the Ritsona Refugee Camp near Athens
(left) Monica - a volunteer from Switzerland
(right) a Syrian mother and her child

About the BP Travel Award

The BP Travel Award is an annual prize that enables  artists to work in a different environment on a project related to portraiture.

The prize of £6,000 is open to applications from any of the current year's BP Portrait Award-exhibited artists, except the prize-winners.

In 2016 the award was won by Laura Guoke

BP Travel Award winner Laura Guoke and her portrait of Petras, a Lithuanian engineer and taxidermist pic.twitter.com/2T013E7FoT

— Portrait Gallery (@NPGLondon) June 22, 2016

There seem to be two strategies used by those who win the Travel Award. They either produce one or two large paintings or a series of smaller paintings. Either way there is a clear theme and story behind the portraits exhibited in the exhibition of the following year's Portrait Award.

About her proposal

Laura's proposal won because she proposed proposal to travel to one of the refugee camps, for those feeling Syria, in Ritsona, Greece (80km from Athens).

Her plan was to use sketches, photographs and filmed material to create large-format portraits of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria and the volunteers helping them.

About the exhibit paintings

Laura's aim was to show migrants as people with names, faces and individual stories, using her work to convey personal themes which may otherwise be difficult to put into words.

Laura has produced two large-format paintings in acrylic for the exhibition - one of a volunteer and one of refugees - based on the material she collected while working in the camp.

You can see them in the BP Portrait Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and on its tour around the UK.

• Monica is a Swiss volunteer. 
• Rima is a Syrian mother of five children. 
• They are a similar age but have very different experiences.

Monica, Rima and Ahmed by Laura Guoke
acrylic on canvas 2016

Monica was volunteering at the camp for a second time, having put her degree in business studies on hold.  Laura has kept in touch with her and Monica is about to return to the camp for a third time.

Laura said

Our society should be proud of these volunteers who have come from all over the world to carry out difficult work for free

Rima is shown with her son Ahmed.  Rima fled Aleppo with her husband and children and her son was born in Athens.  When Laura met them, they had been living at the Ritsona Refugee Camp for several months.  At the time that Laura was visiting, Ritsona was designated a "red camp" by the UN due to inadequate toilets, showers, electricity and medical care.

Laura said of the painting of Rima and Ahmed

I have attempted to reveal the trauma, exile, hopes and fortitude that have marked the lives of the refugees

Rima and her family are currently living in Athens and hoping to be resettled to Ireland.

You can read an interview with Laura on the NPG Blog - it includes photographs of the camp and sketches done by Laura while she was there.

About Laura Guoke

Laura Guoke graduated with a BA in fine arts at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. She followed this up with an MA at Siauliai University (2008-2010). Her work has been seen
in group exhibitions in New York, London and Vienna and in several solo exhibitions in Lithuania and Estonia.

Laura travelled to the Ritsona Refugee Camp and stayed there for two weeks in September 2016. She also worked as a volunteer in the Refugee Camps while she collected material for her portraits.

‘I didn’t think it would be right just to go there to carry out my artistic project; I wanted to be helpful,’ she explains. ‘Meal vouchers are given to each tent in the camp and the food is distributed three times per day, with volunteers working in shifts.’

If you'd like to tell Laura what you think of her portraits you can contact her on

• Twitter @lauraguoke
• Facebook - Laura Guokė

Review: Julia Margaret Cameron at the V&A

I learned a few new things about the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron at the preview of the exhibition of her photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum - which opened last week.

View of the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition

There are currently two exhibitions about Cameron in the museums of South Kensington

• The Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibition is on display in Room 100 (the Photographs Gallery) at the V&A until 21st February 2015 - open daily 10:00 to 17:45.  FREE.
• There is a companion exhibition up the road in the Media Space at the Science Museum - Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy which continues until 28th March 2015

Drawn entirely from the world-class National Photography Collection, the exhibition features the Herschel Album (1864), a sequence of 94 images which Cameron considered to be her finest work to date.Science Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy

If you're going to one I'd recommend you also see the other as well. (Although I personally diverted via the amazing ceramic collection on the 6th floor to the art of the Bauer Brothers - in the Images of Nature Gallery next door at the Natural History Museum).

However a number of the reviews listed at the end are by people who "did the double".

Things I learned about Cameron the photographer included:

• she was a mother of six who took up photography at the age of 48
• her first camera was a gift from her daughter and son in law

"It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater." 

• 2015 marks 
• the bicentenary of her birth in 1815
• the 150th year since her first and only museum exhibition at the V&A in 1865

Within two years Cameron had sold and given her photographs to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and in 1868, the Museum granted her the use of two rooms as a portrait studio.

Henry Cole, Julia Margaret Cameron, c. 1868 

© Royal Society of Art, London

• She had a good relationship with Henry Cole, the Director of the South Kensington Museum 
• She became the V&A's first artist in residence when she was granted use of two room within the precincts of the Museum to use as a portrait studio. Here she used to photograph people who lived in London
• she was an innovator:
• she pioneered the close up and close cropped portrait and, as a result, influenced the photographers of today
• she created photographs which resembled paintings
• she was the first photographer to take a photograph deliberately out of focus
• she was also none too bothered about fingerprints on photographs!
• she was a friend of a number of eminent Victorians - artists, thinkers and scientists.

I found one of the most difficult things with this exhibition was trying to keep in mind the difference between Cameron's own photographs and those of the typical Victorian photographer. I think I could have done with a bit of context to highlight the contrast in practice.

The exhibition is structured around four letters sent by Cameron to Cole and has four sections - which focus around:

• her early aspirations and photographs
• how she began to develop both confidence in portraiture and innovation in terms of techniques
• the need to earn money from her photographs and in particular photographic portraits
• an insight into her working methods

The exhibition includes groups of photographs around a particular theme

Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effects - covers a set of photographs which either strive to interpret paintings or otherwise employ some device for pictorial effect.

Circe, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

One of these was her Madonna Groups

The Madonna Groups

Fortune as well as fame - Cameron started out with the notion that she could make money from her photographs. Indeed one of the things which came across to me quite strongly in the exhibitions was that this was a woman who had an eye on every angle and wasn't above exploiting every connection she had.

This exhibition includes a number of large format portraits. Cameron counted a number of eminent Victorians as friends - the scientists Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel; the painter G. F. Watts; the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (who was her neighbour at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight); and the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. The exhibition includes the photographs she took of them

I personally liked her portraits much better than her 'arty' photographs.

Charles Darwin, Julia Margaret Cameron, 
1868, printed 1875
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Whisper of the Muse, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865 - a portrait of the painter GF Watts who Cameron considered to be her chief artistic inspiration.
Here he is receiving a whisper of inspiration
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Julia Jackson, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867
later Julia Stephen, Cameron's niece, her favourite subject, and the mother of the author Virginia Woolf
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The last section is devoted to "Her Mistakes or Her Successes" referencing the aspects of her technique which would have been mistakes in other people's eyes but which became an intrinsic part of her working approach. She used very careful lighting, soft focus and long exposures to make her photographs somehow seem more real.

This section also includes a recently discovered set of photographs which used to belong to GF Watts which show the flaws in her approach at the most extreme and also the outcomes of the technical challenge of working with potentially hazardous chemicals.

A set of "Defective Unmounted Impressions"

I also learned that the Victoria and Albert Museum was the first museum in the world to create a permanent collection of photographs - and to exhibit photographs as works of art.

It's certainly a Museum with a special place in the history of photography as a visual art.  This is the subject hub for photography at the V&A on the V&A website.

More information

Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle the world by Marta Weiss has been published to accompany the exhibition.
These are links to:

• a biography of Julia Margaret Cameron
• the page on the V&A website about 19th Century Photography

Other reviews

• ‘I love the darkness of her reality’ by Sarah Burton | Financial Times
• Julia Margaret Cameron; Influence and Intimacy reviews – the fine art of keeping still | The Observer
• Julia Margaret Cameron: the Leonardo of photography - Martin Gayford | The Spectator
• Julia Margaret Cameron, Science Museum and V&A, review: 'bold virtuosity' | The Telegraph 
• Julia Margaret Cameron, V&A, exhibition review: Electrifying pioneer turns photography into poetry | Evening Standard

Making Colour and painting with poison

I highly recommend the new "Making Colour" exhibition at the National Gallery and will be giving it a full review very shortly - once I've finished work for the layouts for my book.

Making Colour - The Yellow and Orange Room
Find out more about the paintings in the Yellow and Orange Room in the exhibition on the exhibition website 

Those interested in the history of the development of colours and how colour changes over time will find it absolutely fascinating. So if you're not "all about the art" and have some room for the science as well I recommend you pay a visit if you can.

One picture in particular grabbed my attention - because I learned something completely new to me - and this is it.

Flowers in a Vase (c.1685) by Rachel Ruysch
Oil on canvas, 57 x 43.5 cm
National Gallery

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) was Dutch still life painter who specialised in the painting of flowers. So naturally, I was gravitating towards this painting before I realised why it was in the exhibition!

The painting is in the exhibition to highlight the source and components of a natural orange pigment called Realgar.

One of the themes of the exhibition is the identification of colours - such as purple and orange - which were typically created using mixes of other pigments because there was either no naturally occurring mineral of that colour or it was difficult to obtain.

In the case of Realgar, it is one of the few sources of a natural orange pigment. However it contains arsenic, which means that those very nice orange day lilies were actually painted with a poison and are highly toxic!

Realgar is a highly toxic arsenic sulfide and was the only pure orange pigment until modern chrome orange.
Pigments through the ages

Realgar is made of arsenic and sulphur and is also known as "ruby of arsenic".  Its more common use is in rat poison.

The fact that this rather nice orange pigment was toxic meant is wasn't used very much - although it can be seen in Venetian paintings and some Dutch flower paintings.  Its use in painting died out in the 18th century.

Women and Art

Here's a compendium of links to the current wealth of television and articles online about Women and Art.

BBC - The Story of Women in Art

This is a three part series featuring Professor Amanda Vickery, Professor in Early Modern History at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Her programmes explore how there is an absence of female artists on the walls of art galleries and museums. She reveals the ways in society and culture demanded women behave in a certain way and hence confined and inhibited female creativity

She examines those artists whose reputations have faded into obscurity and comments on one of the reasons being the way their artwork is currently hidden from the public. I knew some but very definitely not all the artists featured in the programme.

All the episodes are available on BBC iPlayer

Episode 1 - Amanda Vickery tells the stories of the early female artists across Europe. This features:

Self Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola (age 22)

• Properzia de' Rossi  (c. 1490–1530) - an Italian female Renaissance sculptor and her works the Grassi Family Crest and Joseph and Potiphar's wife. She was the only female included in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. The suggestion that is that she is not better known because of her outstanding understanding of anatomy - she knew too much about how the male body worked at a time when this was not allowed.

• Sister Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588) a self-taught nun-artist—the first-known female painter of Florence, Italy and her absolutely enormous painting of The Last Supper (7 metres long)

• Sofonisba Anguissola (b. 1532 - 1625) - an artist at the court of King Phillip II of Spain. She was a remarkable draughtswoman when it came to drawing people and became a pioneer of the new genre - the conversation piece. She impressed both Michaelangelo in her youth and Van Dyck in her old age. Her most famous painting - featured in the programme - portrays her sisters playing chess - where the personalities of the three sisters all shine through. He new style of portraiture attracted new clients and got her an introduction to the Spanish Court - at the time of the great rules of Spanish Court Portraiture. Her earlier paintings then transformed into court portraiture painted according to the rules of the court and the time.

Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess (1555) by Sofonisba Anguissola
Oil on canvas, 72 x 97 cm
Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan

Self Portrait - by Lavinia Fontana

• Lavinia Fontana (1552 - 1614) - she was the first woman artist to work in the same way as men. She operated outside the restrictions of convent (Sister Plautilla Nelli) or court (Sofonisba Anguissola). She was a female portrait painter who produced 200-300 paintings in her lifetime and was also pregnant 11 times. She became the portraitist of choice among Bolognese noblewomen.  You can see some of her artwork here

• Artemesia Gentileschi (1593 - ) She had supreme belief in her own talent and skill and tackled the epic from the outset - for example Susanna and the Elders. Her depiction of the story brings a female perspective and also demonstrates amazing skill in painting at the age of 17.  Violence against men features in her painting of Judith and her maidservant - and the assassination of Holofernes (whose head is in the basket.)  This is a website about Artemesia

Judith and her maidservant by Artemisia Gentileschi

Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from circa 1615 by Clara Peeters

• The Dutch Republic in the 17th century also had female artists.  Art in the Netherlands was on a more domestic scale. There was an obsessive preoccupation with the home. A new genre - the still life - was an area where women artists such as Clara Peeters, Joanna Koerten (a paper cutter who outsold Rembrandt) and Judith Leyster could excel. Leyster's painting The Proposition is discussed in the programme. I was particularly pleased to see that Maria Sybilla Merian is also highlighted by the programme. She invented the concept of painting the life cycle of insects with their host plants, revolutionised scientific study and trekked to the tropics to paint her notions of how nature should be represented.

Episode 2 - The story reaches the 18th century. The focus turns to the industrial powerhouse that is Britain and the French Court of Marie Antoinette.

Episode 3 - an illustration of how creative opportunities for women exploded in the 20th century. She travels from London and Paris to the remote Swedish countryside and the bleak desert landscape of New Mexico. The programme features Georgia O'Keeffe.

You can view clips from the series online


I very much like the enthusiasm and historical knowledge which Amanda Vickery brings to bear on her topic. She's a historian rather than an art critic but adds value because of that.

I also love the detective story element - she unpicks the stories behind the paintings, she shows us the coded messages revealed by the paintings for those 'in the know'.

I'm certainly going to be following this series through to the end - if I don't get there a bit sooner. The BBC have taken the unusual step of making the programmes available on iPlayer prior to broadcast - so you can access them all now!

Guardian articles

Amanda Vickery continues her theme in an article on the Guardian which is well worth a read

• Bring female artists out of storage - This is the article written to accompany the series and seeks to explain why there so few paintings by women in public galleries. It's a fascinating article about how the artworks of women artists are hidden from view by curiously uninquisitive museums.
• At the same time there's a second article by another academic. In Here I stand, naked. Why should you think of sex?, Cambridge University don Victoria Bateman (she's an Economics Fellow at Gonville and Caius College) writes about a painting in the current exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In the article she states she wants to raise questions about the depiction of women and challenge the association between the body and sex. The Cambridge news covered it as Why Cambridge University don Dr Victoria Bateman dared to bare all in nude portrait on display at Mall Galleries in London

Other websites

The following focus on women artists

• The National Museum of Women in the Arts
• The Advancing Women's Artists Foundation
• Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence
• Wikipedia - Women Artists

The programme has prompted me to update my website All About Women Artists!

Makingamark on women and art

I've written a few posts in the past about women and art

• Why women succeed at representing artists 12 Oct 2006 Called "Space Women", it's about why women are successful at running galleries and dealing in the contemporary art world.
• 500 years of female portraits in western art 31 May 2007
• Three women artists win Threadneedle ... 16 May 2011 No - these were female professional artists in mid career between the ages of 35 and 50 for whom the Threadneedle Prize was an important stage in the development of both their art and their career.
• Shortlist for Threadneedle Prize 2011 dominated by women ... 08 Sep 2011 

Who Painted This? #48

Who painted this? #48

Back to the whole picture thus week as you struggled with last week's challenge.

You need to tell me - as a comment on this blog - who painted this PLUS all the other things I want to know (see link to rules below).

ALSO Tell me also what you can find out about this artist and/or artwork.

The winner will be the person with the BEST answer rather than the first to respond - so you don't have to rush and have got time to do some research.

For those who've not risen to the challenge before please take a minute to read the rules - click the link/see below.  The questions which need answering don't stop at "Who painted this?"

How to participate in "Who painted this? #47"

PLEASE make sure you read the rules before posting a comment - and ONLY POST ON THIS BLOG what you think is the answer.

Susanne du Toit wins £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2013

Susanne du Toit's portrait of her 35 year old son Pieter has won the £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2013.  As indicated in my previous post, BP Portrait Award 2013 - The Shortlist, the two top prizes both went to parents painting portraits of their children.  This year's prize money awarded by sponsor BP totals £53,000.  Below I've highlighted each of the prizewinners in turn.

Susanne de Toit - Winner of the BP Portrait Award 2013
(left to right:
Bob Dudley, CEO of BP, Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery,
Susanne du Toit and guest presenter Joanna Trollope holding her Award)
all photos copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The BP Portrait Award 2013 - First Prize

Winner of the BP portrait Prize 2013
Pieter by Susanne de Toit
(1080 x 830mm, oil on canvas)
© Susanne de Toit
Photo © Katherine Tyrrell

The first prize is a cash award of £30,000, plus, at the judges’ discretion, a commission worth £5,000, to be agreed between the National Portrait Gallery and the artist.

It's great to see a woman win the prize for the second year in succession in a competition which has traditionally been dominated by male winners.

Susanne du Toit (b. 1955) is South African born but now lives in Crowthorne in Berkshire.

Her portrait of her eldest son Pieter, aged 35 is part of a series of portraits of her family.  In her experience the artist has found that the hands are essential to communicating the personality of the subject and her one condition of his pose was that his hands needed to be prominent.

The averted gaze of this portrait, which was his choice, struck me as characteristic of his reflective character and became intensely engaging

The BP Portrait Award 2013 - Second Prize

Introducing The Pencil Art Society

A new art society has been formed to promote pencil art and pencil artists.

The Pencil Art Society arrives complete with:

• a website - http://pencilartsociety.com/ 
• a Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/PencilArtSociety/ - which has already acquired 521 members
• a Twitter account - https://twitter.com/PencilArtTweets

All they need now is a blog!  They say they have one - but I can't find a link to it - so if anybody comes across it do please let me know.

Title and strapline of the Pencil Art Society
I'm definitely not a fan of the colour scheme - I find it gloomy.

I have to say I'm not surprised that a new society for pencil artists should be created for the following reasons:

• there was no art society purely dedicated to pencil art in all its forms
• there's a big overlap between those who create art in graphite and those who create art in coloured pencils
• many pencil artists are dedicated to art created using dry media but are less enamoured with increasingly narrow definitions about what's eligible media for exhibitions.

This society has a distinctly Canadian - and female - feel to it plus the membership fee is in Canadian dollars.

• Alexandra Bastien, Founder Member, President and Exhibition Director comes from and lives in Quebec
• Erica Walker, Founder Member, Vice President and Education Director lives in Ontario
• Lissa Rachelle Robillard Founder Membe, Secretary and Web Services Director lives in Ontario

All but two of the members to date (as listed on the website) are women.

Purpose of the Pencil Art Society

The Pencil Art Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the recognition of pencil media, specifically graphite pencil and coloured pencil, as fine art.

I've reworked their phrasing of their purpose to highlight what i see as the key aspects of its proposed focus and activities - as follows

Georgia O'Keeffe's birthday is 15 November

Georgia O'Keeffe, 2012 (Wall Calendar)

Today is Georgia O'Keeffe's birthday.  She was born on 15 November 1887 and lived until she was 98.

I've been looking at the resource site I built back in 2007 when I did a major project about her.

What I didn't realise at the time (because I didn't do the maths!) was that although she decided she wanted to become an artist age 10, she actually didn't become a full-time artist until she was in her fourth decade.  She didn't abandon teaching and go to New York until June 1918 - by which time she was 31.

So - for other fans of Georgia O'Keeffe here is.....

...first of all the website I built which provides a wealth of resources for all those who love Georgia's work - Georgia O'Keeffe - Resources for Art Lovers

...and secondly here are links to the blog posts I wrote at the time I was learning about her art and how to translate it into what I wanted to do.  I've also included some posts I've written since.

• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe Month: Macro Flowers
• Making a Mark: Kew Gardens in June
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe month: Two white irises (and three buds)
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe Month: Cactus and quotations
• Travels with a Sketchbook in.......: 22nd July: Santa Fe and Georgia O'Keeffe
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe Month: Learning about Notan #1
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe Month: Learning about Notan #2
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe Month: Learning about Notan #3
• Making a Mark: Georgia O'Keeffe month: "O'Keeffe" by Britta Benke
• The Art of the Landscape: Georgia O'Keeffe's landscapes of northern New Mexico
• Making a Mark reviews......: Book Review: Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico

If you can't get enough of her art, why not try a wall calendar - which is what I do (when I'm not buying books)!

Three women artists win Threadneedle Prize in first three years

Today I've been given some data about entries to the Threadneedle Prize 2011 which is absolutely fascinating for an ex-number cruncher like me.  Read on to find out

• why this Prize is so very different - and 
• why it's much more representative this year!

Also a quick reminder to those intending to enter that there's just two weeks left until the deadline for registration for the Threadneedle Prize - see Threadneedle Prize 2011 - a new selection process for more details or the website http://www.threadneedleprize.com/

Three female winners to date

Well first off - and this is a really important point to emphasise - to date, the first three winners of the Prize were all women!

• 2008 - Nina Murdoch
• 2009 - Sheila Wallis
• 2010 - Patricia Cain

Yay!  Let's hear it for women artists!

What's more they weren't brand new artists fresh from college with people to impress and places to go.

No - these were female professional artists in mid career between the ages of 35 and 50 for whom the Threadneedle Prize was an important stage in the development of both their art and their career.  Which suggests that this is very much a Prize that people at every stage of their careers can aspire to.

Increasing interest from students

The registrations in 2011 show a 5% increase in registrations received from art students.  It's worth remembering that one of the shortlisted artists in the first year had only just graduated with a degree in fine art - and had submitted her entry while still a student.  Being shortlisted for a prize like this is something which is worth having on a CV at any stage of your career - but particularly if you are a young artist.

In broad terms the age profile of the 2011 entry has not changed much so far.  This year there are slightly fewer entries from the 35-44 category - which has provided the majority of entries to date - but this could be because more younger and older people are now coming forward because of the digital entry process.

Digital entry is making a huge difference to who enters in 2011

In 2008, 2009 and 2010, up to 80% of the entrants were based in and around London.  Obviously that's not a fair representation of the excellent figurative and representational art that's being made around the country.  Last year's winner for example lives in Glasgow in Scotland.

However with the advent of the digital entry - which means people don't have the expense of getting the work to London unless they pass the initial selection hurdle - many more people from around the country have entered.

As at 13th May, only one third of those applying via the digital entry live in and around London.

Compared to last year, there have been increased entries via the digital submission compared to the same week last year.

From which one can conclude that the digital entry process is proving to be a roaring success since it's enabling a more representative profile of entries from across both the country and the age ranges.

A different sort of profile

The Mall Galleries where the Threadneedle Prize exhibition is held is the home of the Federation of British Artists - which, in turn, is the society which unites the leading art societies in the UK.

Interestingly, FBA members entering the Theadneedle Prize are only between 2% and 4% of the total entry - in all four years of the show to date.

What this means for visitors to the Exhibition is that the artwork on display is going to be unlike that seen in the art society exhibitions which are held there during the rest of the year - because the majority is going to have been created by a very wide range of non-members of the FBA Societies.

Speaking personally, I think it would be good to see a few more FBA members competing.  These are all societies with a strong representational bias and, in theory, this competition is a good fit.  Certainly a significant number of FBA artists could enter - and some have 'twigged' how selection for art competitions tends to vary from the selection of work for the annual exhibitions of art societies.

After all they have the illustrious example of Daphne Todd the ex President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, who won the BP Portrait Prize last year with her portrait of her mother just after death!

However Daphne is yet another woman.... 

Maybe that's the extra added ingredient which makes for a successful entry - being a woman? ;)  I wonder if the chaps are up for giving them a bit of serious competition this year?   

The deadline for entry for the 2011 Prize and Exhibition is Wednesday 1st June and the pre-selection registration process is by digital entry.