In its 20th year, the contest has put on new clothes. It’s now called the
Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times watercolour competition,
incorporating the name of the Icelandic bank that is now in charge.
Nothing else has changed, apart from the name of one of the judges. This year,
they were: Professor Brian Allen, director of studies at the Paul Mellon
Centre (chairman); Sir Peter Blake, artist; Carol Robertson, artist and
former prizewinner; Dr Joanna Selborne, curator of prints and drawings at
the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery; and Frank Whitford of The Sunday
Times.
The award presentation will take place on Tuesday, September 11, with the
broadcaster Mariella Frostrup as the guest of honour.
Winner, £15,000
Julia Farrer, Bridge
Julia Farrer’s large, strong but delicate painting eloquently demonstrates how
far this competition has travelled since its beginnings 20 years ago. Then,
it would have been difficult to imagine any abstract composition being
selected for the exhibition, let alone winning a prize. And ideas about
traditional watercolour painting used to influence the judging, too. Now,
few eyebrows are raised at the use of Chinese white or even of acrylics.
Nobody will be scandalised by Farrer’s success, either. At least one
abstract among the prizewinners is now a regular occurrence. This was the
first time she had submitted work, too, so she was doubly surprised by the
result.
Before the competition, I knew of Farrer as a printmaker and maker of artist’s
books rather than as a painter. Given her distinguished career, my ignorance
was inexcusable. “I’ve always painted,” she told me. “In fact, I first
showed a painting at the Hayward Annual in 1978.” After studying at the
Slade, she has exhibited widely, not only in London, where she lives, but on
the Continent and in North America. She’s been a Harkness Fellow at the
University of New Mexico and in New York, and her work can be found in many
important collections, including those of the Arts Council, the Yale Center
for British Art and the Tate.
Farrer’s prints, in a variety of techniques and always abstract, are
distinguished by restrained but great visual beauty and technical
accomplishment. So are her books, in which the complexity of a geometric
composition evolves from one page to the next. All her works, whether
prints, books or paintings, are of a piece, linked by a common interest in
geometric form. “The books and prints go together with the paintings,” she
says. “You can’t separate them.” All explore the illusion of space and
volume. “That space has become more and more architectural in character,”
she says. “My paintings have become more constructed, more object-like.”
Her paintings retain the outstanding qualities of her prints, especially in
the attention she pays to pristine surfaces and immaculate edges. All of
these compositions, including our prizewinner, exploit the ambiguities that
result from representing a three-dimensional figure on a flat surface. The
result, as you can see, is reminiscent of an architectural drawing, an
impression, which, as the title Bridge suggests, Farrer clearly wants to
create.
It wasn’t just the ambiguous representation of space and volume that attracted
the judges. It was also the unassertive but exquisite colour and, perhaps
above all, the obvious mastery of the medium, demonstrated especially in the
contrast between the transparent and the opaque areas, heightened by the two
contrasting forms. This is surely a worthy prizewinner for the
20th-anniversary year of the competition.
Second prize, £7,000
Angus McEwan, Permanently Temporary
When I mentioned to Angus McEwan, a Scot who lives near Dundee, that his
painting had several of the qualities associated with an abstract
composition, he immediately agreed. “I’d go further,” he added. “I think
there’s an abstract core to every good painting.” Yet McEwan’s picture is
also an exercise in almost photographically sharp realism. The surface and
texture of every part of this ramshackle structure of wood and metal and
mesh is rendered with a persistence and an attention to detail that make
every part of it seem solid and tangible.
“I like painting wood and rough surfaces,” McEwan says, “and I loved the
colours and haphazard arrangements of the materials here. The structure is
actually in Marrakesh, right in the heart of the tannery. The gut-wrenching
smell alone would make you run a mile, but someone has found a patch of dirt
in which to take up residence. So this is part of a dwelling, just thrown up
without any thought about permanence or the way it looks. Yet the arbitrary
nature and placement of the boards, corrugated iron and doors has created a
harmony and aesthetic all of its own. There’s a beauty that’s purely
accidental, and it’s that beauty I wanted to preserve, clearly
distinguishing between the texture of each of the different surfaces to
preserve the identity of each part.”
The painting wasn’t made on the spot in Morocco, but in the studio, with the
help of sketchbook drawings. McEwan also surrounded himself with similar
materials. “The trick is to work in the studio while preserving a sense of
that freshness that made the subject seem exciting in the first place,” he
says. He likes to experiment, using resists above all.
McEwan is a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour
and teaches at Dundee College. He has submitted work to the competition for
the past two years, and last year his entry was in the exhibition. He learnt
that he had won a prize (though not which one: this report is the first news
of it) while in California, by looking at the competition website. Though he
was on holiday in LA, he was also doing preparatory work for a show at
Edinburgh’s Open Eye gallery next year.
Runner-up, £2,000
Jennifer McRae, Self-portrait in English National Opera Jacket
“As soon as I spotted this fantastic jacket, which had been made for heaven
knows what ENO production, in a reclamation yard in Battersea, I knew I had
to paint myself wearing it, but the price was £150, too much for me at the
time. When I visited next, the jacket had gone – someone had bought up all
the ENO costumes they had. I tracked them down, but they refused to sell, so
I ended up having to hire the jacket.”
This is not the only aspect of this self-portrait that’s worth mentioning. The
objects on the small table are there for a reason. “There’s a broken cup
there, which I’d never throw away, because there’s a reproduction of an
Elizabeth Blackadder watercolour on it. She’s a wonderful painter, so this
is a kind of homage to her. Also, there are bottles of Doctor Martin inks –
nothing to do with the boots. These inks are simply marvellous –
transparent, pale and subtle. I can’t do without them. Sadly, for some
reason I can only get them in a shop in Notting Hill.”
McRae is probably best known as a portraitist. She regrets that the people who
commission her tend to ask for a drawing or oil painting rather than a
watercolour. “But it’s not as frightening a medium as it’s made out to be,”
she says.
McRae has won two prizes in this competition before, both of them second
prizes. Then she was invited to join the judges for two years. “It was nice
to be on the other side and see how things work for once. It’s also good to
see a lot of very different things by other artists. I don’t feel at all bad
about winning a prize as soon as I’d resigned from the jury. I’m sure nobody
favoured me for that or any other reason.”
How does she intend to use her prize money? Do you suppose that some might be
blown on a jacket, formerly the property of the ENO?
Runner-up, £2,000
Gordon McDowall, Edinburgh
You can instantly see what attracted the judges to this painting: it has to do
with the dramatic light effects and the understanding of architectural
structure. Gordon McDowall is a Scot who lives not in Edinburgh, but in
Glasgow, and used to paint in oils. Then, about 17 years ago, he turned
exclusively to watercolour – “the magic medium”, as he describes it. He
likes its luminosity, and is more concerned with tone than colour – so
his palette is based mainly on earth colours. Brighter colours are
introduced only later.
McDowall likes to wet the paper at the start. “This helps with the flow of
washes and prevents ‘banding’ – the effect when different
wet-against-wet colours or tones fail to blend properly.” McDowall is fond
of unusual techniques, too. He uses salt, sprinkled into the wet paint, then
rubbed off when dry, to achieve certain textures, and clingfilm, impressed
into a wet wash and removed when dry.
His prizewinner is characteristic of almost all his work. He likes painting
cityscapes, especially in Italy, but also works in Glasgow and Newcastle,
where he painted the outside of the Sage concert hall. He has worked in
Cuba, too.
“It is essential to have good reference material,” McDowall says. “For me,
this entails taking lots of photographs.” He uses photocopies, too, to help
him see tonal shifts in the original motif more clearly.
Runner-up, £2,000
David Prentice, Black Hill Below British Camp
It’s almost embarrassing to admit that David Prentice has won prizes in three
earlier competitions, including a first and a second. The first was in 1990,
so he has a clear idea of how the competition has developed and changed in
the past 17 years. He thinks I’m too hard on the very traditional
watercolours that dominated the early years of the competition; on the other
hand, he has never liked the sort of highly mixed shows this competition
inevitably results in. “I’m always depressed by the RA’s summer exhibition,
because even the outstanding work is dragged down by the substandard.”
Prentice’s work has always been associated with the Malvern Hills, the
landscape that inspired Elgar. Recently, he was persuaded by a gallery in
Cornwall to turn to Cornish subjects. “ So I took a helicopter to the
Isles of Scilly, and the result was a series of quite abstract paintings of
landscapes from the air, in which I tried to combine the sense of being
inside and outside the helicopter at the same time. I thought they worked
well, but not a single one of them sold. What sold was the paintings of
Malvern.”
Prentice hasn’t submitted anything to the competition for four years because
he has been seriously ill, unable to go outside to work on the spot,
gathering the information for the big watercolours he works up in the
studio. This prizewinning painting is, it turns out, one of the first things
he did after making a complete recovery. This means we should be receiving
regular submissions again, and shall, no doubt, be awarding further prizes
to this superb watercolourist.
Runner-up, £2,000
Wladyslaw Mireki, Bridge with Chappel Viaduct
Watercolourists usually get on with one another. They are, in my experience,
clubbable, friendly people who, though ambitious, are remarkably devoid of
envy or competitive drive. It therefore came as no surprise to hear that
Wladyslaw Mirecki, a Chelmsford-born artist of Polish parentage, was a close
friend of David Gluck, the winner of last year’s first prize, who, sadly,
died after a painful illness not long after the private view. Indeed,
Mirecki received the pamphlet calling for entries only two weeks or so after
he and his wife had been to Gluck’s funeral. His late friend had given him
several useful painting tips over the years, one of them involving the use
of proportional dividers for scaling up a drawing. It’s a device Mirecki
almost certainly used often in this impressively detailed painting.
The judges liked this watercolour not only for its steady control of large
areas of close detail but for its slightly unconventional composition. The
main points of interest, the arch and railings of the bridge, are pushed off
to the right, and there’s a large expanse of meadow grass occupying the area
where you’d expect the focal point to be. Chappel Viaduct, the subject of
many other pictures by Mirecki, is far away in the distance. The artist is
self-taught, but has painted all his life, including while studying for a
science degree.
Where to see the winners
The exhibition of this year’s Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander
competition finalists will be at the Mall Galleries, SW1, September 12-22,
then at the Sculpture Hall, Manchester Town Hall, October 9-20. Details of
how to enter next year’s competition will appear in Culture in spring 2008.
If you have any queries about the competition, call Parker Harris on 01372
462190 or visit www.parkerharris.co.uk
