The Royal Society of Portrait Painters and Mall Galleries are delighted to announce the Prizes & Awards from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition 2020.
Congratulations to all artists who have been awarded prizes by our generous prize givers.
If you weren’t able to make the exhibition we hope that with videos, audio, images, and statements by the winners to watch, hear, see, and read, you can experience and enjoy their works wherever you are.
The exhibition is also available to Browse & Buy online now.
The Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture
Shuang Li
Woman in a Stadtische Galerie
The work uses traditional European techniques to detail an elderly woman who lived in Germany during World War II.
The work expresses the sitter’s inherent persistent spirit and conveys the vicissitudes of time. The dress is a reflection of contemporary tradition.
The de Laszlo Foundation Award
Nneka Uzoigwe
Lily Before the Play
A portrait painted from life of the wonderful Lily Holder prepared to go on stage.
Prince of Wales’s Award for Portrait Drawing
Jack Freeman
Walkie Talkie
I made this drawing of Patricia after a walk through Grantchester near Cambridge. The evening light made the scene particularly poignant. I wanted to capture the feeling of a walk, late in the day, through countryside, and I think the smokey blackness of the charcoal – particularly as it works into this hand-made paper gives the picture a grainy sentimentality.
Burke’s Peerage Foundation Award
Joshua Waterhouse
Dame Glynis Breakwell
Smallwood Architects Prize
Steven Wood
Sandancer
Sandancer is the name used to describe those who come from the town of South Shields, Tyne & Wear, although the term is hardly known by anyone outside the local area.
The sitter, Julie Kassim, is on one of the different beaches in South Shields in a place called Frenchman’s Cove. Scattered around the painting are symbolic symbols of runes that represents her spirituality and beliefs in the supernatural and white magic.
The image is placed in landscape form giving the viewer a sense of floating above her.
The RP Prize for the Best Small Portrait
Robbie Wraith RP
Studio Portrait
The RP Award
Stephen Leho
The Most Important Thing in the World
The sitter holds a small mobile she made, it represents the solar system. She has unsettled it and is straightening the threads.
The painting is about mental health and emphasises the need to stay in the present.
