Japanese Body Painting Artist

Three very impressive and very different paintings have been shortlisted for the £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2016. Each of them is guaranteed a prize.  They are: Girl in a Liberty Dress by Clara Drummond - a portrait of her friend and a fellow artist Hugo by Benjamin Sullivan - a portrait of the poet Hugo Williams;  Silence by Chinese artist Bo Wang - a portrait of his dying Grandmother. Both

The Call for Entries for The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2016 has been published.  This is the 29th year of the largest and most prestigious prize for contemporary watercolour painting in the UK.  This is the one that most watercolour painters want to be selected for as a mark of credibility on their CV. The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition aims to celebrate and reward excellence

Last year, the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of British Artists was a pleasure to review (see Royal Society of British Artists 2015 - Annual Exhibition). It had well and truly bounced back from its nadir in 2012 (see see RBA 2012: An exhibition of Middle England?) This year's exhibition has 445 artworks in the main exhibition and 35 works in the NADFA's RBA Scholars exhibition and 20

The National Open Art Competition opened for entries at the beginning of March. The closing date for entries is 10th July 2016. The 2015 competition attracted nearly 4000 entries and awarded around £60,000 in prizes and mentoring opportunities to 35 winning artists. Th 2016 finalists will be exhibited in NOA’s Winter Exhibition at Mercers’ Hall in October where the prize winners will be

I visited the annual exhibition of the Contemporary Watercolour Competition run by the Royal Watercolour Society on Friday.  The exhibition continues until 16th March at the Bankside Gallery (right next to Tate Modern and the River Thames on the South Bank. You can see a virtual exhibition here on the RWS website.  This has hugely improved in terms of the page of works, and each work also

The £15,000 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize for 2016 - and a Gold Medal - has been awarded to Henry Kondracki for his oil painting of The Cowgate - in the snow - by The Worshipful Company of Painter Stainers and the Lynn Foundation. This is a prestigious prize for original, two-dimensional works in any painting or drawing media. The prize has two aims: to encourage the very best creative

Do you know what questions to ask when considering what to do about your artist's website - and whether or not it needs improving? Working your way through the 30 questions in this post will give you a "to do" list for improvements you need to work on. I look at a lot of websites while writing this blog. Some of them are very good, some are shambolic and a lot could be improved in both major and

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

"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

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

Below you'll find the names of the people who won medals at the RHS London Botanical Art Show today.  You can find out more about them and their exhibits in my previous post about RHS Botanical Art 2016 - Selected Artists Well done to the RHS Organisers for having the list of medal winners available as a pdf file on their website by the time I got home! Best Botanical Painting by Julie

This year's Annual Exhibition of The Pastel Society - NOW @ The Pastel Society - opened to the public at the Mall Galleries on Tuesday. It continues until 3pm on Saturday 5th March.  The Society very kindly invited me to their pre-PV Lunch and I spent a very long time at the exhibition on Monday afternoon! Featuring works created in pastel, pencil, chalk and charcoal, the Pastel Society exhibits

Arts Council England has commissioned a new national study into how visual artists in England live and work. This is a link to the Artists’ Livelihoods survey which forms part of the study. What makes this study - and survey - serious and different is that it is being conducted within the context of a a broad coalition of partners from across the visual arts which have shaped and support

The exhibition of artwork by the 50 artists shortlisted for the Artist of the Year 2015 Prize sponsored by Artists and Illustrators Magazine opened yesterday at the Mall Galleries and is on display until the end of Saturday 27th February. The "Artist of the Year 2015" gets £1,000 in cash and gallery representation at Panter & Hall. You can see the rest of the prizes on offer on the competition

Last night I discovered that I'd missed an excellent BBC programme called Apples, Pears and Paint: How To Make a Still Life Painting which was broadcast last month. It provides a history of what has historically been the least popular genre of painting - and the depiction of fruit, flowers and domestic objects - from the still life painting in Egypt and Pompeii to Cezanne and Picasso via

The artwork selected for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize exhibition at the Mall Galleries is different from previous years - and I like it a lot better. Threadneedle Prize Exhibition: A view of the Main Galleryprior to the Preview Compared to previous years, the changes I noticed are that the art - to my mind - is a lot more accessible. This is an exhibition which will be enjoyed by more

The winner of The Columbia Threadneedle Prize 2016 of £20,000 is Lewis Hazelwood-Horner. The competition is the leading open competition for figurative and representational art and the exhibitions are held annually at the Mall Galleries. The prizewinning work is called "Salt in Tea". Lewis has also won a solo exhibition for a wider body of his work at Mall Galleries later this year.  Lewis has

Thirty five botanical artists have been selected by the RHS Picture Committee to exhibit at the dedicated RHS Botanical Art Show 2016 in the Lindley Hall in the City of Westminster on 26-27 February 2016. This is the largest number of botanical artists in one RHS Botanical Art show during the time I've been visiting. Below you can find A list of the artists exhibiting in 2016 organised by the

I have a problem with contemporary art. I always feel like I need a map to navigate what's happened in the last 100 years. There's just so many different artists and so many different art movements - and I find it very difficult to sort out who's important and who's not. This week Laurence King published a book called Art Visionaries which might well provide a resource to fill the gaps in my

The Cumberland Pencil Company announced the Call for Entries from international artists for The 3rd Derwent Art Prize on Monday.  The deadline for entry is 1st June 2016. The competition is now a biannual competition - so the next one will be in 2018. Astri Saunders, Marketing Manager at Derwent, said “We are proud to launch the Derwent Art Prize for the third year. Our aim of the