BP Portrait Awards 2020 - Esther

Since 1989, the BP Portrait Award has held competitions every year in the field of portraiture. I’ve attended the accompanying exhibitions since the early 90s as Aberdeen Art Gallery has frequently been one of the participating galleries, presumably because of the oil industry connection (I want to write about the art & artists rather than the controversy & understandable environmental concerns over the sponsorship, however…) This year it is the only gallery the exhibition has been able to travel to. 

In particular what I like about this award is that it is a) exclusively for portraiture & b) encourages painting over other media. The overall winner is rarely my favourite, with the exception of Philip Harris’s Two Figures Lying in a Shallow Stream from 1993 (I think my first year of attending) Stephen Shankland’s The Miracle (pictured above) in 2004. A Gray’s School of Art graduate, Shankland has also exhibited in small local galleries around Aberdeen (noteably the Tolquhon Gallery & Rendezvous Gallery) & despite a realistic approach, nevertheless possesses a satisfyingly painterly style. As an important aside, he also paints a most excellent cat where required… Here is a photo-list of past winners & for me looking over them is like looking at an album full of photographs of people you used to know:

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp-portrait-award-2020/exhibition/past-winners

There are 1st-3rd prizes, as well as a Young Artist Award & a Travel Award. 

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp-portrait-award-2020/prize-winners/ 

The Travel Award is frequently one of the more interesting selections & gives more of a sense of the works in progress & the artist’s process. The winner has submitted a proposal for a grant to travel to record an aspect of human life & the following year they exhibit the fruits of their proposal. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, there will be no awards next year due to the renovation of the National Portrait Gallery in London (now closed until 2023). 

The work of 2019 winner Manu Saluja is as sensitive as it is accomplished. Her proposal consisted of an excursion to Amritsar in India to depict the volunteers that provide food for the pilgrims to the Golden Temple. One of the key principles of the Sikh religion is to serve others. Despite depicting somewhat uncomfortable, noisy & busy surroundings, there is a peacefully intense & concentrated feel to her finished works. 

Here is a beautiful clip that was made by the artist & featured in the physical show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-vFUeGnIlE&feature=youtu.be

In addition, there is a Visitor’s Choice competition, the winner of which this year was Portrait of Fatima by Jamie Coreth. This stunning portrait was used for all the publicity & despite her head being about five feet high in some of the posters, the picture is surprisingly small. It goes to show the skill of the artist to produce a work that can be increased in size so much & lose none of the impact. No pixellation here…

This week, we had booked (free, of course) tickets for the gallery – at the moment, limited numbers of people are allowed to enter at a given time (with your mask, your QR code) for two hours.

Often you’d come away from the Portrait Award show a little disappointed, feeling as if there was little included to excite you, or a previous year had had a better selection - but not this year. All killer, no filler. The show covered a lot of bases, trends & styles.

https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp-portrait-award-2020/exhibition/exhibitors/ 

It’s always tempting to pick out your own winner. This year, one favourite was certainly Bevis by Clare Ceprynski Ciekawy. The photograph belies the sheer size of this. It’s huge & enormously complex. One can only imagine that the act of creating it was itself an immense challenge. To try to make sense of that patterning & the falling of the light on the fabrics must have presented many difficulties. In a smaller form such as here, it is easier to make sense of it, even as a viewer – seeing it in reality, you feel as if you are almost trapped deep in a vaguely-sunlit forest. 

One of the aspects of several included works was the tendency to leave the outskirts or lower half of a painting sketchily finished, as if to say, “Yes this is incredibly realistic work, but look! It’s a painting!” Moreover it reveals a little of the process, for example in Songbook by Richard Wilson, another firm favourite this year. It shows Wilson’s friend Obi in the act of writing in a notebook she uses for songwriting. Her head & hair are painted to spectacular effect & the positional relationship between artist & subject creates a dramatic pose. On a personal level, I also enjoyed the fact she’d been doodling in among her notes.

Another small but wonderful portrait was Steven Higginson’s My Brother, Ronnie. I have discussed Steven’s work on this blog before & he’s always worth mentioning. He has previously been selected for the Award show & although this might appear to be an unassuming painting, the detail & selection of colours is in fact quite elaborate. Often, he will play with the light more, create a background with fine & fiddly details but this is a more straightforward & perfectly subtle effort.

I’m really not a fan of competition for cultural things, in fact I’m known to dislike the idea intensely. It seems however that we still haven’t evolved enough, read enough or looked around enough or perhaps developed enough confidence to say what we like in art or why we like it without someone telling us what to think. As viewers, we seem to be stuck in a rut in that regard. We need to be pointed towards “good” art as if it is still an elitist subject, when in fact because of the internet it has the potential to be more inclusive than ever before.

That being the state of things & the way things currently are in the arts in general on a global level thanks to Covid, competitions like this & the John Byrne Drawing Awards pave the way for new talent & bang the drum for the value of fine art.  They do celebrate discipline, practice, painting & portraiture & show us that art is for everyone & about everyone.