BP Portrait Award

Excellent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the wining pictures in this year’s BP Portrait Award.

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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