Annual Exhibition 2026
– – 10am to 5pm | Closed on Tuesday 12 May | North, West and East Galleries
Presenting some of the best painted and drawn portraiture selected from both national and international submissions.
This year the prize fund for the exhibition reaches £41,000!
Jennifer Anderson also shares some insight into her exhibiting portrait…
we look forward to seeing you all soon:
“This painting was the first studio piece I made since the death of my sister a year previously. She died of a brain tumor at the age of 51 and, having lost her husband also to brain cancer two years previously, I became primary carer for her and her two children. It was a traumatic and painful time, and starting to paint again was an important milestone for me.
When I began the painting, I didn’t imagine it would be a representation of my recent experience, but that’s what it became. My sister was also an artist and among the things she left behind was a large canvas she had painstakingly built and prepared in the traditional manner with linen and rabbit skin glue. Her illness meant she never painted on it so it was left blank. It felt right to use this canvas and bring it to life from it’s blank state, as though my sister had gifted me an immediate opportunity to dive into expression when the urge took me, rather than the usual process of building and preparing my own surface which can take many days.
Although the figure in the painting is not my sister, what emerged in the composition became an attempt to put down on canvas what feels impossible to put into words; an expression of the feeling that an absence can have weight and presence that affects everything in your life. Even though life continues in all it’s ordinary and mundane ways, that absence casts a light that’s always there at the periphery of vision, but far too bright and sharp to turn and look on directly.”
-Jennifer Anderson
Jennifer Anderson, ‘Presence of Absence’
