Lynn Painter-Stainers 2016 - Selected artists and works

The 2016 Exhibition for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize - celebrating some of the best in representational painting - opens at the Mall Galleries tomorrow.  It's on from Monday 7th to Sunday 13th March (10am - 5pm) and admission is free.  For those unable to get to London to visit the exhibition you can also view the exhibition online

Selected artists

Below are the names of the artists whose works have been selected for the exhibition from the open entry (see Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2016: Call for Entries).  Those with two works are listed first - and then those who had one work selected for display.

In total there are 139 works in the exhibition within the context of an 82% increase in the number of submissions in 2016.

The selection was down to the panel of judges who were:

• Catharine Davison, Artist; 
• Ken Howard OBE RA NEAC, Artist; 
• James Lloyd, Artist; 
• Sam Wadsworth, Artist; 
• Andrew Wilton, Visiting Research Fellow at Tate Britain.

Prizes will be announced at the Private View tomorrow evening. The first prize is £15,000 and a total of £30,000 in prize money is on offer - which is just one reason which makes this a competition that artists are keen to be exhibited in!

So what does the work of an artist selected for Lynn Painter-Stainers look like?

All works selected should reflect the two aims of the competition namely:

• to encourage the very best creative representational painting and 
• to promote the skill of draughtsmanship

Several of the artists might be described as Lynn Painter-Stainers favourites and I've seen works by them exhibited by this exhibition in previous years. If you've ever wondered why other people's work gets chosen but not yours you might find it helpful to review their websites - which is why I include the links!

Links to their websites or blogs are embedded in their name.

What else can I tell you about the artwork?

This year I've been able to obtain the dimensions and media that artists have used - and the prices (but I've not listed the latter). As you can see the majority of the artworks are in oil - on a variety of surfaces.

I'll also be visiting the exhibition this week and posting on this blog

• my review and photos from the exhibition 
• a spot of statistical analysis of the data to see whether there are any interesting facts about the size of works or media or price - but that will be another post. 

(See the side column for details of how to subscribe to this blog).

Incombe Hole near Ivinghoe Beacon, Buckinghamshire by Tim Galton
Oil on canvas, 92cm x 114cm £6,950

Two works

CATALOGUE NAME	TITLE OF WORK	SIZE	MEDIUM
Sarah Jane Bellwood (gallery)	Reap.Sow	134 x 95cm	Watercolour
	Salt.Earth	39 x 54cm	Watercolour
Peter Clossick NEAC	Garden	152 x 122cm	Oil
	North Devon	68 x 77cm	Oil
Sean Cunningham	15/09/2015	35cm x 30cm	Acrylic on board
	10/12/2015	35cm x 30cm	Acrylic on board
John Dobbs NEAC	Digger and Dumper	25 x 35cm	Oil
	Diggerland	30 x 30cm	Oil
Annamarie Dzendrowskyj	Twilight- Bruges I	38 x 28cm	Oil on linen
	Twilight- Bruges V	38 x 28cm	Oil on linen
Tim Galton	Incombe Hole near Ivinghoe Beacon, Buckinghamshire	92 x 114cm	Oil on canvas
	Iona: Cries of Gulls Lost over Storm Island	112 x 152cm	Oil on canvas
Elena García de la Fuente	I Wish I Brought My Glasses II	30 x 40cm	Oil on canvas
	Enough	30 x 40cm	Oil on canvas
Chris Greene	Never Reaching the End	100 x 73cm	Oil on canvas
	In His Own Image and Likeness	100 x 73cm	Oil on canvas
Frances Hatch	Charmouth Walk 4. Buttress and Gullies Re-visited	36 x 31cm	Cliff materials and gouache on board
	Charmouth Walk 5. Mudslide Track	36 x 31cm	Cliff materials and gouache on board
Michelle Heron	Coin-Op	30 x 26cm	Acrylic and plaster
	'The Hobbit' (3)	30 x 24cm	Acrylic and plaster
Alex Maczkowski	The Allotment #3	43 x 53cm	Graphite/graphite powder on paper
	House By The Pylon	43 x 53cm	Gouache and carbon on paper
Tom Palin	Flower Painting	36 x 25cm	Oil on oak
	Remembrance	36 x 25cm	Oil on oak
Melissa Scott-Miller	Back gardens in autumn	102 x 100cm	Oil on canvas
	View of Battersea	40 x 30cm	Oil on canvas
Jennifer Smith	Aylesbury Estate	72 x 57cm	Watercolour and ink
	Women crawling	30 x 22cm	Oil on board
Nicole Weisz	Eyewitness: Brighton	60 x 47cm	Acrylic on newsprint
	Eyewitness-China	60 x 47cm	Acrylic on newsprint
Susan Wilson	Albanian Girl	127 x 76cm	Oil on linen
	Lake Alexandrina NZ	127 x 76cm	Oil on linen

Apologies to Alex Hanna - who I failed to spot as being a two picture artist I was going through the list - and who is listed below.

Learn about how to market you and your art online - at Heatherley's

"How to get on - online" is the title of my latest talk about websites and social media for artists. 

I've been asked by Heatherley's Art School in Chelsea to do a talk on 21st March about how artists can market both themselves and their art online using websites and social media

Click this link for more details

How to get on – online

Marketing you and your art online - using websites and social media

• Why an online presence is essential for artists
• Why websites and social media are different
• The pros and cons of websites and social media
• Options for getting your art online
• How to get your art online for FREE
• How to be mobile friendly
• How to spend your money wisely

The event is free and is open to people who don't attend the school. However there is a limit to the number of people who can be seated which is why seats will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Venue: Heatherley's Art School

Founded in 1845, The Heatherley School of Fine Art is the oldest independent art school in London, after the Royal Academy, and is among the few art colleges in Britain that focus on portraiture, figurative painting, printmaking, illustration and sculpture.

Address: 75 Lots Road, Chelsea, London SW10 0RN - The website provides both a map and clear instructions for how to get there
Tel: 020 7351 4190
Email: info@heatherleys.org

For your information

If your art school/society/group would like to have a similar talk for your students or members please contact me to discuss further details.

"Your Paintings" moves to Art UK

Once upon a time there was an initiative called Your Paintings.

• The aim was to digitise and provide a comprehensive online catalogue of all the oil paintings in public ownership in the UK.
• As yet it does not provide any record of the watercolours, sculpture, drawing and prints also held by public collections - more's the pity.
• For some reason the website for 'Your Paintings' was hosted by the BBC and I never quite understood the rationale for this.

However.....

 Your Paintings has now been replaced by "Art UK" (http://artuk.org/).
(I can only assume their marketing 'bright spark' forgot to look at the phrase on Google first and didn't spot the competition for this keyword phrase!)

Art UK is the successor to Your Paintings. It is a joint initiative between the Public Catalogue Foundation (now known as Art UK), 3,000 museums and other art collections, and the BBC.

Wikipedia explains the history - although I think the first sentence is very confusing.

So basically, the initiative was run by the Public Catalogue Foundation - who also published the actual catalogues per county or institution - and now that organisation is known as Art UK. On the new site you can.

• Discover 212,732 artworks - these can be differentiated by Region, Type, Topic and Style (which is why I now know that London has no examples of work by the Scottish Colourists but I do know where the oil paintings by Elizabeth Blackadder are located)
• Explore 3,261 venues where oil paintings and collections are held across the UK. These can be sorted by region and type of venue.
• Meet 38,370 artists - 
• access to some of the BBC iWonder Guides to specific topics such as 
• How does art help us remember World War One? (in liaison with the Imperial War Museum)
• Face of Britain: Portraits that capture a changing nation (in liaison with the National Portrait Gallery)
• art events across the UK - via Culture 24 - so you can see, for example, all the events that are on this weekend across the UK

Interestingly a lot of the people who have articles written about this new website have read the press release and interviewed key bods - but haven't actually tried it out.

How do I know this? Well I've tried it and it's not without its problems.

I'm actually very surprised at some of the practical problems. If I'd been project managing this initiative there is no way this would have gone live without having some quite major glitches sorted eg

• Once you've chosen a selection, it's very difficult to change it. So if you initially pressed museum and gallery as the type of place you wanted to review, you can't get rid of that selection if you then decide you'd much rather look at was available in another type of venue.
• It's also quite difficult to backtrack out of a filter selection. I ended up doing a lot of pressing of the "back" key! So design and navigability could be improved.

What this basically means you've always got to hit the top level menu and start again rather than refining filters as you go. That's poor functionality in my book.

Plus

• it apparently excludes some notable museums and galleries people might think are in public ownership - like the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford - which you won't find in the listing of museums and galleries in the South East until you realise that it's "The Ashmolean Museum"
• they've not updated images for those which have recently come out of copyright constraint.

Still Life of Asparagus
Adriaen Coorte (c.1660–after 1707)
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology

I have to say having delved a little in places known to me (like the local Town Hall of the place where I used to live as a child) there are some absolute rubbish pieces of no quality included in the collection!

There are however very many wonderful pieces of art - like Adriaen Coorte's wonderful painting "Still Life of Asparagus". The website also gives an explanation for paintings - where one is known - plus refers you to the website of the host for more information if it's online

Typically, the artist has isolated his motif and painted it with a refined touch and a subtle combination of soft green and purple. This was one of the artist's favourite themes. It appears in twelve known paintings, mostly in combination with other fruit. Only two of the series show the bundle of asparagus isolated on a ledge as here: one in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, dated 1697, the other in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, dated 1703.Re. Coorte's Asparagus

Sydney Parkinson (1745–1771)
Sydney Parkinson (c.1745–1771) (attributed to)
Natural History Museum

There are also some not so wonderful paintings which are also very significant. Such as Sydney Parkinson's self portrait held at the Natural History Museum. Parkinson was the artist who accompanied Captain Cook on the expedition which discovered Australia and who recorded all the plants and natural history that they found.

I think this is a website which is:

• definitely worth bookmarking
• definitely worth exploring
• but take your time - and hope they fix the navigation of the site sooner rather than later.

My main hope is that they get a move on and start cataloguing all the watercolours very soon!

References:

• Website aims to offer images of all publicly owned art in Britain | The Guardian
• Art UK Launches in London | Apollo Magazine (blog) 
• Art UK: Launch of Ambitious Online Platform to Show The Nation's Art |PR Newswire (press release) 

Call for entries: National Original Print Exhibition

The National Original Print Exhibition is run by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers which is the UK's premier printmaking society

Call for Entries

Deadline for Entries: 21 June 2016

Who can enter

• The competition is open to international entries - but the entrant is responsible for getting their work to (and from) designated drop off and collection venues

What can you enter

These are the Guidelines

• All forms of original printmaking are eligible for entry. (That means no reproductions of art in other media - digital or otherwise!)
• All artwork must have been made in the past 3 years, dating from Tuesday 1 March 2013.
• There are no size restrictions
• Maximum of 6 prints
• All prints must be framed in wooden frames
• All entries must be handed in unwrapped (i.e. if you do not enter by hand you need a courier service which will unwrap your entry)
• All works selected for exhibition must be for sale. (note that 45% commission will be deducted from the sale value of all works sold during the exhibitions or directly as a result of the exhibition.)

How to enter

• entry is digital - images can be a maximum of 3mb
• entry fee payable is £12.00 per entry (£8.00 for students)
• This is the entry form

Selection Panel

The Judges are

• Mychael Barratt (President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers)
• Trevor Price (Vice President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers)
• Julia Beaumont-Jones (Print Historian & Author)
• Bruce McLean (Artist)
• Mike Taylor (Director of Paupers Press)

You'll be notified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 if your entry has been successful.

There's no guarantee that your work will be hung if selected as a final selection is made when the exhibition is hung. (That's also another way of saying if your work is very large it better be very good!)

Handing-in of selected works

Selected works are to be delivered (unwrapped):

• to Ground Floor, 23 Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey, London SE16 3UL 
• on Friday 16 or Saturday 17 September 2016 11AM - 6PM

Interestingly this competition seems to have cracked the VAT issue for international entries

INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS

• Please liaise with Picture Post using the contact details below, who will:
• Manage the VAT process.
• Receive artwork from DHL/FedEx/TNT etc.
• Hand In on the due day.
• Store the packaging for use in the event of a return being required.
• Collect unsold or unaccepted artwork.
• Repack.
• Arrange the export service.

Exhibition

The exhibition of selected prints will be held:

• at Bankside Gallery, 48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH (next to Tate Modern on the South Bank)
• between 21 September – Sunday 2 October 2016

How to afford to exhibit your art

The third article in my series of "Cost effective ideas for artists" - about How to afford to exhibit your art - is now published in the April edition of The Artist.

This summarises where you can exhibit and ways to reduce costs plus how to avoid some nasty surprises when exhibiting with galleries or your own account.

A sample of the latest article in the April edition

The article covers:

• solo exhibitions - at home or a local venue
• art group exhibitions
• commercial galleries
• maximising your income
• minimising your costs
• how to avoid nasty surprises
• PLUS it provides an exhibition expenses checklist and
• identifies the extra expenses you incur (instead of paying commission) when you run your own exhibition

I'm covering online sites for exhibiting your art in the next article in the series.

As readers will be very aware I do tend to go to - and review - a lot of exhibitions. I've also been asking questions of artists, gallery managers and owners and collecting information about different ways of exhibiting for many years now.

For more in depth information I suggest you check out the pages in the Selling Art Section of my Art Business Info website. These include:

• A Guide to Art Dealers & Art Galleries
• Alternative Options for Exhibitions
• Selling Art from Home
• A Private View Invitation