BP Portrait Award
Excellent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the wining pictures in this
year’s BP Portrait Award.
Telegraph
Independent
This was one of
the best years for a while of this annual exhibition. For the first time
candidates were able to submit work digitally with only the shortlist having to
show the real works. Whether this widened the pool of entrants, and there were
certainly more overseas entrees, or whether more abstract pictures didn’t work
so well digitally I’m not sure but the works tended to be more realistic and a
better quality.
It’s hard to pick
a favourite out of so many good pictures. I loved Sam Goldofsky’s picture of
David Jon Kassan, an Auschwitz survivor, with his tattooed number showing on
lovely wrinkled arms. Also a pair of portraits by Leslie Watts “Charlotte and
Emily”, Renaissance style pictures of her daughter and her partner. I liked
Nancy Fletcher’s matching pictures of Hamish and Sophie Forsyth which they
commissioned after meeting the artist at the 2012 show!
A always like to
spot a theme at the exhibition and I think this year it was self-portraits,
there seemed to be more than usual. My favourite picture comes from them and
was the very clever “Sink or Swim” by Ian Cumberland, a self-portrait of
himself fully clothed in the bath! I loved how realistic it was yet it was
still a painting with discernable brush strokes. The effect he got of the shirt
underwater was wonderful.
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