Thursday, July 07, 2016

Interview with Benjamin Sullivan (BP Portrait Award 2016 3rd Prize)

The major benefit of NOT winning the BP Portrait Award - but being a regular exhibitor - is that the exhibition enables a lot of people to see your work. That, in turn, means more opportunities for selling work and getting commissions for future portraits from people who see and like your work.

Ben, Ginnie and Edie Sullivan and the BP Portrait Award Third Prize Painting of Hugo

That was the major conclusion drawn from my VIDEO interview with Benjamin Sullivan who won 3rd Prize in the 2016 BP Portrait Award. He's a "BP regular" who has had his portrait selected on a number of occasions since 2002. In fact I think he may well lay claim to being the portrait painter who has been selected the most times for this exhibition.

Let's also not forget that in 2015 the BP Portrait Award Exhibition was seen by 329,556 visitors.

Where else can you get this number of people viewing your portrait painting?

Plus if you keep coming back - and become a BP regular - some artists become better known than the people who won!


Video Interview with Ben Sullivan


My Video Interview with the 2016 Third Prizewinner Ben Sullivan covers:
  • the benefits - in terms of sales and commissions - for a professional portrait painter of getting a portrait into the BP Portrait Award Exhibition 
  • being a professional portrait artist
  • painting people in their own home
  • his approach to painting and how he starts
  • the importance of drawing from observation
  • working from observation vs working from photos
  • the value of painting family and friends on a regular basis



This year I wrote a post Comparison of the RSPP Open and BP Portrait Award Competition in which I compared the similarities and differences between the open annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the BP Portrait Award which is an art competition.

I think a number of portrait painters - around the world - might like to reflect on Ben's comments in the video and my observations in the abovementioned blog post.

More about Benjamin Sullivan RP NEAC


You can read a lot more about Ben in my shortlist blog post - £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2016 - The Shortlist. Key facts are:
  • previously selected 12 times for the BP Portrait Award Exhibition (2002 and 2006-2015)
  • won the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize in 2007
  • the youngest ever painter to be elected (at the time) to both 
    • the New English Art Club (2001) and
    • the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (2003)
  • BA (Hons) in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art (graduated 2000)
  • born in Grimsby in 1977 and lives and works in Suffolk - but will travel for commissions.
  • website: http://www.benjaminsullivan.co.uk
  • Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/benjaminsullivanart/
Check out the portrait with the model.
This is Hugo Williams (the subject of the portrait) and his wife



BP Portrait Award Winners and Shortlists



You can read more about the past winners and shortlists in my post Interview with Clara Drummond - Winner of BP Portrait Award 2016.

Below is a list of the videos of past prizewinners

Videos of BP Portrait Award prizewinners

I began to interview prizewinners in 2012 - starting with Aleah Chapin - whose video has now been seen by around 80,000 people

I try to interview as many prizewinners as possible the following morning after the Awards Ceremony. It's often very loud and noisy in the exhibition and I try to leave the interviews towards the end of the morning when the hubbub has died down.  Sometimes there is a problem with language and sometimes the artist has disappeared before I can interview them!

First Prize

Second Prize

Third Prize


More about the BP Portrait Award 2016


You can see the exhibition at:
READ MORE......>>
Posted by Making A Mark on Thursday, July 07, 2016 0 comments
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Tuesday, July 05, 2016

Interview with Clara Drummond - Winner of BP Portrait Award 2016

I've uploaded my video of my interview with Clara Drummond, the 2016 Winner of the BP Portrait Award to YouTube

Clara Drummond with the portrait which won the First Prize
in the BP Portrait Award 2016
Girl in a Liberty Dress (260 x 370 mm, oil on board)
You can view my video interview with Clara below - or you can click the YouTube icon bottom right and view it on HD and a larger scale within my YouTube Video Channel.



WARNING! As often happens with my interviews with the winners of the BP Portrait Award, there's a lot of hubbub in the background. This year it was compounded by the painting being hung in the middle of the exhibition rather than towards the end of the gallery - so even more noise! However you should be able to hear my questions and her responses without too much difficulty unless you have a hearing impairment.  However I would recommend listening to the interview when you don't have any background noise in your own environment.

By the way it's a great interview and very informative!

To give you a flavour of the interview here are some of the highlights of what she talks about:
  • why she decided not to go to art school
  • what she learned as an assistant to portrait painter Jonathan Yeo
  • the drawings and paintings of other artists which provide her with inspiration
  • her emphasis on drawing
  • why she paints her friends repeatedly
  • why you need to keep growing as a painter and try new techniques
  • why experimentation is important when working 
  • what was the one thing she did which changed her approach to her format and painting
  • how her approach has changed recently - and how she describes it
  • what it was like meeting Jenny Saville - and why she has been an inspiration
Below you have
  • more about how you can see this year's exhibition in London and on tour
  • more about Clara Drummond and other comments on her win
  • FOR THE SERIOUS FANS: more about BP Portrait Award Winners from previous years

More about the BP Portrait Award 2016

You can see the exhibition at:
  • National Portrait Gallery until 4th September after which it tours to:
  • Usher Gallery, Lincoln (12 September – 13 November 2016) and 
  • Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (26 November 2016 - 26 March 2017.)

Plus you can see it online my video of the exhibition

These are my previous posts relating to the 2016 competition
This is how to sign up for information about the 2017 Award

More about Clara Drummond


This is Clara's website http://www.claradrummond.co.uk
This is Clara on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/clara.drummond.79

Contact Clara to find out where she is teaching.

Read more about Clara in the press about her win

More about the Winners and the Shortlists


What follows is for those seriously interested in this competition!
READ MORE......>>
Posted by Making A Mark on Tuesday, July 05, 2016 3 comments
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Sunday, July 03, 2016

Video and review of BP Portrait Award Exhibition 2016

The 2016 Exhibition for the BP Portrait Award is very different from previous years. 

That's not a surprise given that threre's been a change in the Director of the National Portrait Gallery and this year Jenny Saville was asked to be a member of the Selection Panel. The Director of the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland was also involved with the selection this year.


Video of the BP Portrait Exhibition 2016


For those familiar with the exhibition you can see the changes for yourself in my video of the exhibition below (which you can also see on youTube).  As usual the 'bumpy' view is due to me literally walking with my iPhone6+ around the gallery.

Apologies for the lack of audio - there's normally background "hum" but in this instance there was music playing and I don't have the copyright permission - hence it's now a very quiet video!



If you're unable to visit the exhibition, my video is particularly relevant to:
  • getting a much better understanding of the relative size of the individual paintings
  • appreciating more about the choice of subject, size, style, palette and approach to painting a portrait for this exhibition.
You can find out more about the individual artists:
  • on the NPG website - see exhibitors. Click the individual images to see a bigger image and read about the painting and the artist
  • in my blog post BP Portrait Award 2016: Selected Artists - which lists those selected by country and also includes links to their websites (where one can be found).

What's different in the 2016 Exhibition


The main changes I noticed are as follows:
  • there are many more smaller portraits.  This is possibly a reflection of the cost of shipping original works - but I think is more likely to have been a deliberate choice by selectors.  I think it's maybe partly a rejection of the notion that you have to "go big to impress" - which is no bad thing. (I'm going to do a count of the sizes of the portraits - and will add this in to this post. I ran out of time today having had complications with making the video and the video upload. I do however now know where a video which has been made but crashes before it is shared goes on my iMac!)
  • the photorealistic style has taken a back seat. A number of those painting realistic paintings are in fact painting from life.
  • there are an awful lot of portraits cropped to head and shoulders / head and upper torso (ie minus hands) 
  • there are absolutely no big heads of the type which were very prevalent in recent years
This view inclues the largest head in the exhibition
    • spouses and partners eg 
    • brother and sisters and in laws eg 
    • parents eg LMF03 by France Borden
    • grandparents eg Bo Wang's grandmother in Silence
    • close friends eg 

It seemed to me that the paintings selected this year in general have stuck much more closely to the brief. They represent portraits by people who have had plenty of opportunity to work from life with their subject.
One exception is Diversion by Charlie Masson - which does NOT conform to the brief for the paintings i.e.
The work entered should be a painting based on a sitting or study from life and the human figure must predominate.
I also noticed that, by and large, only well established portrait artists are painting people of note.

I must confess I'm very much in favour of this approach to selection. To my mind everybody selected for the exhibition should in theory be capable of accepting a commission from the National Portrait Gallery to paint a famous person. To do that they must be capable of making studies of and painting from life.

I pondered on the influence Jenny Saville brought to bear on the exhibition. She told me at the Awards Ceremony that she pushed hard for more painterly paintings.  It's certainly the case that are more painterly portraits and much less hyper-realism than I've seen in the past.

I'm going to do a count of the sizes of the portraits - and also count the different types of portraits (eg head only; head and torso; head and hands etc) and will add this in to this post. I ran out of time today having had complications with making the video and the video upload. I do however now know where a video which has been made but crashes before it is shared goes on my iMac!

I wonder what would happen next year if it was a requirement that every portrait had to include hands as well as a head?

More about the BP Portrait Award 2016


These are my blog posts
Posted by Making A Mark on Sunday, July 03, 2016 4 comments
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Saturday, July 02, 2016

Want to study Art at a UK University?

If you want to study art at a UK University, you might like to take a look at the Guardian Rankings of the different Universities offering degree courses for both Art and the History of Art.

The Guardian has published a University Guide. This includes the University League Tables for 2017. There is a key to the meaning behind the headings which is it important to read before consulting the actual tables for the subject you are interested in - I've quoted them below
Key to the table headings
1. The Guardian ranking of the university
2. Name of university
3. The Guardian score out of 100 is a rating of excellence based on a combination of all the other factors
4. Course satisfaction is the percentage of final-year students satisfied with overall quality, based on the National Student Survey (NSS)
5. The teaching quality score is the percentage of final-year students satisfied with the teaching they received, based on the NSS
6. The feedback score is the percentage of final-years satisfied with feedback and assessment by lecturers, based on the NSS
7. Staff-student ratio is the number of students per member of teaching staff
8. Spend is the amount of money spent on each student, given as a rating out of 10
9. Average entry tariff means the typical Ucas scores of students currently studying in that department
10. The value-added score compares students’ individual degree results with their entry qualifications, to show how effective the teaching is. It is given as a rating out of 10
11. The career score is the percentage of graduates who find graduate-level jobs, or are studying further, within six months of graduation. It’s our way of ranking employability
If so minded you can actually download all the tables in full!

Rankings of UK Universities offering Art



The top five universities - which I found a little surprising - are:

Slade School of Art Facebook Page
The bottom five universities are (in reverse order - worst first) are:
  • South Wales 
  • Canterbury Christ Church
  • East London
  • Salford
  • Leeds Beckett
These are all what I would call 'late comers' to the university title.  Universally they ALL have:
  • very low spend per student
  • low to lowish entry tariffs
  • high to very high student to staff ratios
  • very low assessments of the calibre of the host university by the Guardian
Posted by Making A Mark on Saturday, July 02, 2016 1 comments
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Friday, July 01, 2016

Sketches from The Battle of The Somme

Today is the 100th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in which over a million people from 50 countries died in five months during the First World War.

On the First Day of the Somme:
  • the British Fourth Army had 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 men were killed. 
  • The French had 1,590 casualties and 
  • the German 2nd Army lost 10,000–12,000 men.

This is about the way the battle was recorded at the time by those who drew - officially and otherwise - and the conditions that they found while they were there.
With the French and British armies calling upon troops from the colonies and the French Foreign Legion, units from 25 nations and 50 countries were involved in the Battle of the Somme. In five months of combat, the total number of men killed, wounded and missing reached over one million and entire nations were sent into mourning. Casualties amounted to 420,000 for the British, 190,000 for the French and 420,000 for the Germans. The landscape of the north-east of the Somme was completely devastated; villages were razed to the ground and fields were turned into lunar-landscapes by shelling. http://www.somme-battlefields.com/

Drawings of the Somme Battle and its aftermath


Those who drew varied. Some were or became famous. Others are little known. I'm guessing there are probably a fair few sketchbooks which never made it into official archives.

Those drawing the Somme include:
  • Muirhead Bone (1876-1953)- the first official war artist. He became an active member of the War Artists' Advisory Committee in the Second World War. Bone was a draughtsman and etcher who had studied art in the evenings at the Glasgow School of Art and was a member of the New English Art Club.
  • E H Shepard (1879-1976) - who subsequently provided illustrations for Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows
  • George Hoffman Spencer - an architect and artist whose estate bequeathed his sketchbook to the Imperial War Museum. It contains some 150 drawings. 
  • Captain Robert Mauchlen (1885-1972) drew a series of sketches during the war, including several during the Battle of the Somme.
  • J.B Morrall - A sketchbook of Morrall's drawings was sent in by Mrs Morrall (unclear whether this is the artist's wife or mother), and the Imperial War Museum purchased five of them
The war artist Lieutenant Muirhead Bone crossing a muddy road, Maricourt, September 1916
Imperial War Museum Collections |© IWM (Q 1464)
Commissioned as an honorary second lieutenant, Bone served as a war artist with the Allied forces on the Western Front and also with the Royal Navy for a time. He arrived in France on 16 August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme and produced 150 drawings of the war before returning to England in October 1916. Wikipedia

 George Spencer Hoffman drew the soldiers who were exhausted or wounded and killed in the battle.
Vignettes of soldiers on the Somme July 2016
First World War Sketchbook Volume 1 - Salvage, Somme, July 1916
George Spencer Hoffman (1875-1950)
Imperial War Museum Archive

 EH Shepherd MC OBE (1879-1976) sketched his dugout in watercolour and the combat area around where he served.
Though in his mid-thirties when World War I broke out in 1914, Shepard received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, an arm of the Royal Artillery. By 1916, Shepard started working for the Intelligence Department sketching the combat area within the view of his battery position. On 16 February 1917, he was made an acting captain whilst second-in-command of a siege battery, and briefly served as an acting major in late April and early May of that year, when he reverted to the acting rank of captain. He was promoted to lieutenant on 1 July 1917. Whilst acting as Captain, he was awarded the Military Cross for his service at the Battle of Passchendaele. Wikipedia
Our BC post copse B, near Maricourt Somme August 1916 E H Shepard Lieut.
pencil and watercolour wash, 257mm c 180mm
Imperial War Museum | Gift of Mrs E H Shepard, 1976

You can see more of EH Shepard's watercolour sketches from the First World War on the Imperial War Museum's website.
“Shepard went out to the Somme in June or July, and his brother, who he was close to, followed a couple of days later,” says curator Olivia Ahmad. “But he was killed almost instantly. When Shepard found out, he went to find his grave. He took a map with him and drew a tiny cross marking the co-ordinates where his brother was buried. All of the other maps he had were working documents, so they’re a bit tatty, but this one is pristine, with just this one tiny notation,” she adds.E.H. Shepard: An Illustrator’s War | Creative Review
Some were adept at sketching soldiers in  action. This is a very impressive sketch by Captain Robert Mauchlen MC (1885-1972)

Sketch of the attack on the Butte de Warlencourt on 5 November 1916
by Captain Robert Mauchlen MC (1885-1972)
Sketchbook in the Battle of the Somme archives of Durham County Record Office
The Butte de Warlencourt is an ancient burial mound off the Albert–Bapaume road, north-east of Le Sars in the Somme département of northern France. .....The Germans constructed deep dugouts throughout the Butte and surrounded it by several belts of barbed wire, making it a formidable defensive position in advance of Gallwitz Riegel (the Gird Trenches). After the Battle of Flers–Courcelette (15–22 September) the view from the Butte dominated the new British front line and was used by the Germans for artillery observation. During the Battle of Le Transloy (1–20 October), part of the Battle of the Somme, the Butte de Warlencourt was the subject of several attacks by the British Fourth Army, which were costly failures; attacks in November also failed. Wikipedia
The artillery shelling reduced everything to nothing. This is an article about How War Artist Muirhead Bone Recorded The Battle of The Somme

An Artillery Barrage on the Somme Battlefield:
Mametz Wood, Contalmaison Château, Fricourt Wood and Delville Wood in the distance.
Drawn from King's Hill, Fricourt, September, 1916
Muirhead Bone
pencil and wash 330mm x 501mm
Imperial War Museum Collection | Art.IWM ART 2098

Villages, trees and people were all obliterated - and the artists continued to sketch and record.

Contalmaison was a village which was a target on the very first day - on 1st July 2016
Contalmaison can be found about three miles north-east of Albert and around half a mile south of Pozieres, on the southern side of the main D929 road. The village was an objective for the 34th Division on the 1st of July 1916, but it took many more days of hard fighting before the 8th and 9th Green Howards of the 23rd Division were able to take it at 4.30 p.m. on the 10th of July.
World War One Battlefields
Contalmaison in 1916 : the remains of the village
J. B. Morrall
watercolour on paper, 203 mm  x 304mm
Imperial War Museum Collection | © IWM (Art.IWM ART 205)
a view across the devastated village of Contalmaison, which has been reduced to piles of rubble and tree stumps, with only a single recognisable building visible.
(IWM)
'The abomination of desolation'
Mametz Wood: after the autumn advance, 1916. 
J. B. Morrall
watercolour on paper, 228 mm  x 286 mm
Imperial War Museum Collection | © IWM (Art.IWM ART 202)
a view across the devastated Mametz Wood, with splintered tree stumps and flooded shell holes. The body of a dead German infantryman lies in the foreground, the legs visible but the torso and head hidden by the water of a flooded shell hole. 
(IWM)

Then the wounded were brought home - first embarking on the ships. This is a lithograph by Muirhead Bone of the embarkation of the wounded which would have been based on sketchbook studies at the time. Muirhead Bone created a portfolio of 60 prints at the end of the war based on studies made while working as a war artist.

War Drawings By Muirhead Bone: Taking the Wounded
lithograph on paper; 505mm x 378mm

Then they return home via London.

This is the view I have of Charing Cross Station every time I return home from a visit to the National Gallery or National Portrait Gallery. It's therefore especially poignant to realise the function the station also played in bringing home the wounded from the Battle of the Somme. (The painting below was painted the year after the war finished.)
A view of the exterior of Charing Cross railway station. The Strand is lined with crowds of civilians watching Red Cross ambulances leaving the station.
Outside Charing Cross Station, July 1916.
Casualties from the Battle of the Somme arriving in London
J Hobson Lobley 1919
oil on vanvas, 2057mm x 3073mm
Imperial War Museum Collection
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2759)

There's something very special about recording an event which you witnessed.

There's also something very special about maintaining an archive - and then sharing it and allowing others to share so that others can see what went before....

See also

Posted by Making A Mark on Friday, July 01, 2016 1 comments
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