Artist and Illustrator - Artist of the Year 2011

Artists and Illustrators - is one of the UK's most popular art magazines.  It currently has a competition to identify the Artist of the Year 2011 - and you can see all the contenders online.

This is the fourth year of this competition which is sponsored by Cowling and Wilcox who have art supplies shops in Soho, Shoreditch and Camberwell.

The competition apparently had thousands of entries - and I have to say some of the shortlisted artists have produced some very good work.  I liked the landscape section the best, thought there was some strong work in the portrait section - but found the still life section less impressive than the other two.

See the shortlist - and vote!

These are the pages where you can review the entries and then vote.  So far as I am aware there are no geographical constraints on who can vote.

• Portrait
• Landscape - see if you can spot a name you may know from this blog!
• Still Life

The winners will be announced in the January issue of Artists & Illustrators which is published on 9 December 2011.

Questions for you!

• Did you enter?  
• What do you think of the shortlisted candidates?
• Tell me who you voted for!

NEW two-stage digital pre-selection process for FBA Exhibitions

A new submission and selection process for FBA Art Societies with Annual Exhibitions at the Mall Galleries is being introduced from 1st November.  This should cut costs for some artists in the future.

Receiving day at FBA Offices in Carlton House Terrace

One of the perennial complaints I hear from artists in the UK is about how they would very much like to submit work to the Annual Exhibitions of the national art societies based at the Mall Galleries BUT  that they are deterred by the significant costs involved in framing and transporting artwork which might be rejected.

In future, the costs incurred by many of those having to deliver work to London in response to a Call for Entries from one of the major art societies in the UK may well be reduced - at least for those who are unsuccessful in having their work selected.

The new process will also

• greatly reduce time spent on travelling for a number of people. 
• reduce the costs for the art societies and those involved with organising the exhibitions - which in turn should keep entry fees from rising in future.
• address the problem of access to FBS offices in Carlton House Terrace during the Olympics.

The Mall Galleries and FBA Offices are located on the edge of an Olympic Zone (lots of activities in Horseguards Parade!).  The Galleries are expecting major traffic restrictions in a large area around St James and the Mall before, during and after the Olympic and Paralympic Games (6 June - 30 September 2012).  As a result they expect that arrangements for delivery, collection, parking and visits to the offices and Gallery may be disrupted during this period.

Frankly there's not a lot that the FBA can do about this - as nobody is going to move the Olympic site to let artists deliver pictures!  However this new process will greatly reduce any frustration which may be experienced since it offers artists a way of avoiding this in the first instance.

Read on to find out more about the new process.

How to do a reverse image search

There are two easy options for doing a reverse image search:

• Tineye
• Google Reverse Image Search

I guess most will be familiar with the former - but maybe not the latter?  The post summarises:

• what is a reverse image search
• why do a reverse image search
• how Tin Eye works
• how Google Reverse Image Search works
• a comparison of the results
• image privacy issues

It also highlights the results I got when doing a test search - using the "popular choice" image from an exhibition which had been highlighted on this blog.

Chris Dunn wins The Bath Prize 2011

The Bath Prize is proving to be very popular with artists who enjoy painting the urban landscape.

Winner of the £6,000 Bath Prize for 2011: Magpie in George Street by Chris Dunn
watercolour, 75cm x 48cm
copyright Chris Dunn

Chris Dunn has won the £6,000 First Prize for a painting that best captures the spirit of the City of Bath in 2011.  Here's Chris on his blog - Chris Dunn Illustration / Design - announcing his win

Tonight the Bath Art Prize Winners Were Announced...And I was the shocked to discover I received first prize!! Below is the winning piece. You can view my progress by visiting my previous post (click here).

Chris has had a very good year having also been selected as a finalist for the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2011.  Here's his review of that competition.

How the Bath Prize Competition works

This is the third year of The Bath Prize.  The competition is open to professional and amateur painters at all levels and has been designed to produce a multi-faceted portrait of a very special city.

The Bath Prize requires entrants to produce at least one painting related to a specified location in the Georgian heart of Bath. The locations offered to each artist are allocated by ballot.

Artists are then encouraged to work on the streets, en plein air - which means they are seen by people visiting Bath, and that reinforces they notion that Bath is a city worth looking at!

However they can also sketch or photograph their subject and complete the work elsewhere.

Entries, Exhibition, Prizewinners and an Auction!

Altogether 250 artists submitted 394 entries this year.

Of these 158 works (that's 40%) were selected for judging.  You can view the selected entries in the Gallery on The Bath Prize website - click an image to see a much larger image.

I took a quick trot through the images and these popped up as being the images I stopped at and looked some more.  Take a look at:

23rd October 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

Art in the UK is seeing the emergence of a new regionalism.  The notion is that the geographical spread of contemporary art is an indicator of its maturity.

The UK's premier contemporary art prize - the Turner Prize - opened at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead this week.  The Prize is seen by some as a sort of "crude barometer" of contemporary art.  It's certainly had a fair few artists of note winning the Prize since it was first conceived - although the prize has not always gone to the artist who turned out to be the "best" of the bunch.

• London Counterpoint #1:  It's the first time that the Prize has gone outside London for its initial show Turner prize 2011 shortlist unveiled as exhibition opens at Baltic in Gateshead
• London Counterpoint #2:  None of the shortlisted artists completed art degrees in London.

The Turner Prize award is £40,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £5,000 each for the other shortlisted artists. The Prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months proceeding 4 April 2011. It is intended to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art and is widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.

The shortlisted artists are summarised below.  Here's a slideshow of the artists and their work and this is a video of Turner Prize 2011 by the Press Association.

• Karla Black - this is an artist with an impressive set of sponsors

For her solo show at Galerie Capitain Petzel, Berlin, and for contributions to various group exhibitions, which together consolidated her innovative approach to sculpture and displayed her increasingly powerful works made with ephemeral materials.

•  Martin Boyce (this is an interview with Martin Boyce by The Independent)

For his solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, which built upon his project for the 53rd Venice Biennale by holding the viewer within an atmospheric sculptural installation. Boyce’s work combines references to design history and text and is marked by a subtle attention to detail.

• Hilary Lloyd - (Here's a video about her work as a video artist)

For a solo show at Raven Row, London. The exhibition marked a step-change for the artist in terms of the ambition and scale of her project, which investigates the interrelation of moving image, sound and sculptural form in the portrayal of the urban environment.

• George Shaw - this is a Guardian article about him and his work)

For his solo exhibition at BALTIC, Gateshead. Shaw’s paintings depict the area around his childhood home and are rendered exclusively in Humbrol enamel paint. With their deeply personal juxtaposition of subject matter and material, they lie intriguingly on the edge of tradition.

I'm guessing - but I think George Shaw will win.  There's a few newspaper critics hoping he will win too. He was certainly my favourite when the shortlist was originally announced.  Not least because of this wonderful video of him talking about his paintings at a previous exhibition at the Baltic.

George Shaw and his Humbrol enamel paints at the Baltic

Artists and Art Blogs

This week I asked How do you define a "professional artist"?