Craigie Harper
Elisa Filomena
.JPG)
Brian Kielt
Sarah Leonard
Andrew Leventis
Cathy Lomax
Thomas MacGregor
| CRAIGIE
HARPER WINS THE MOTH ART PRIZE 2020
CRAIGIE HARPER was born in Aberdeen and studied
painting at Gray’s School of Art and drawing at the Royal Drawing School in
London. He lives and works in a Camphill Community, which supports young adults
with learning disabilities, where, when he's not painting in his studio, he organises and teaches art workshops for
the residents.
‘Being selected for
The Moth Art Prize was a real surprise. I am particularly delighted to have my
recent paintings featured in The Moth
– a prestigious honour, given the standard of work curated in the magazine.’
Harper, who will receive €1,000 and spend two weeks at The
Moth Retreat in Cavan as part of his prize, has recently been exploring sense
of place and Scottish identity through a series of paintings about a fictitious
town called Kilmarning, some of which feature in the winter issue of The
Moth.
‘I was overheard speaking about Kilmarning in my sleep. An internet search
revealed the place didn’t exist, so I adopted the town as my own. It serves as
a vessel for ideas, narratives and characters, much in the spirit of Craggy
Island or Springfield. Kilmarning feels like a parochial place where the
townsfolk are caught in a collective folly, which is an overarching theme in
these paintings.’
Some of his paintings appear in the winter issue of The Moth, and you can check out his website here.
WORK BY THE
FOLLOWING WAS ALSO COMMENDED
Elisa Filomena graduated in Painting from Turin's Academy of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely in Italy, and recently had a solo exhibition at Circoloquadro Gallery in Milan. In 2003 she won the Alida Epremian scholarship, and in 2008 the Matteo Olivero Painting Prize. Some of her artworks are in private and public collections, including the Permanent Collection of the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation in Cuneo and the Public Drawings Collection at Salò
Museum.
Brian Kielt is based in Northern
Ireland. A graduate of the Belfast School of Art (2010), Kielt uses
drawing and painting techniques that manipulate personal and found imagery to
create alternate narratives. Current exhibitions include the solo shows ‘Bardo:
An Unknown Country’ in Newtownards and ‘Confessional’ in the University of
Atypical Gallery Belfast, and work will be included in this year’s Royal Ulster
Academy Exhibition at the Ulster Museum. He is currently developing his
practice from his studio in the mid-Ulster countryside. Sarah
Leonard is based in Glasgow. Her current residency is with Fortune Works, a Day
Centre for adults with learning disabilities and additional support needs in
Drumchapel. She is working on portraits of all the awesome people who
attend the centre. Some of these portraits and a film about the project can be
found on her website. ANDREW
LEVENTIS
Andrew Leventis is an oil painter who paints objects, miniatures and still lifes. He earned a BFA in Painting from the American Academy of Art in Chicago and an MFA in Fine ARt from Goldsmiths College, London. His work has been featured in Norway at Kunstgalleriet, and in London at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Matt Roberts Arts and the Griffin Gallery. He is currently an Assistand Professor of Painting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Cathy Lomax is a London based artist. She has an MA Fine Art
from Central Saint Martins, London and is currently completing a PhD at Queen
Mary University of London, looking at the role of makeup and artifice in the
creation of the Hollywood female star image. Lomax’s paintings and
installations assimilate the seductive imagery of film, fame and fashion,
juxtaposing it with personal narratives. Her particular interests are femininity, masquerade and
the way that popular culture is constructed, consumed and related to. Lomax was an Abbey Painting Fellow at The British School
at Rome in 2014 and won The Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2016. Recent
solo exhibitions include Star Bar, Broadway Cinema, Letchworth
Garden City (2020) and The Blind Spot, Swindon Museum and Art
Gallery.
Thomas MacGregor (born 1976) is a British painter living in
London. He studied painting at ECA 1995–99 and on
the Turps studio program 2018–20. The world that he
creates in his recent body of work is based on his experience living in Bolivia
and representing the life of an army boot camp there in a straightforwardly
representational manner. Back home, as studio time has passed, this tidy,
contained, world has collapsed and mutated, broken out.
Colleen Quinn has been an artist most of her life spending several
decades as a sculptor before switching to painting in 2012. She received her
Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, USA in 2002. She has also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts and at the Art Students League in New York. She won the Leeway
Grant for Women in 2002 for the completion of an outdoor sculpture in Philadelphia,
and did a month-long artist residency in Costa Rica in 2008. She started
painting political figures in 2012. ‘I was interested in slowing down the
onslaught of media imagery and taking a longer, closer look at the faces of
those in power. As the political situation has changed, these paintings have
become a form of personal protest.’
Several of her paintings have been published in Scoundrel Times and The Nation,
two online magazines based in New York. Rhiannon (b. 1984, lives and works in
London) recently graduated from the Turps Banana Painting Program, having
completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. Her first solo
exhibition, ‘Accessorise With A Tiger’, took place at Arusha Gallery in
Edinburgh in 2018, with her second opening at Darbyshire Ltd. in London (March
2019). Recent achievements include winning the 2019 Delphian Open Call,
culminating in a solo show with the gallery (September 2019). She has been
involved in group exhibitions at COB Gallery, Subsidiary Projects, Flowers
Gallery, A.P.T. Gallery, Transition Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Cookhouse
Gallery (London) and Gift Shop Gallery (Seattle). She undertook the
Panorama Residency in Guadalajara in 2015/16, the Rimbun Dahan Residency in
Malaysia in 2014 and received The Rome Art Program Scholarship in 2012.
Rhiannon has been awarded the Darbyshire Prize for Emerging Artists (2018) and
the John Hoyland Scholarship, Chelsea College Of Art (2015). Julia Silvester is an Italian-born, London-based fine artist.
Following her BA Fashion Illustration studies at London College of Fashion, she
recently graduated with distinction from MFA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of
Arts. Silvester's painting practice places emphasis on themes of femininity,
isolation and the home, while locating strangeness within the ordinary. The
familiar and the unfamiliar unite in psychically charged encounters between
figures, birds and interior spaces. In a disrupted form of realism, layers of
oil paint on aluminium create a bruised colour palette that depicts a
disquieting defamiliarization of interiors. Silvester's use of colour,
composition and light constructs cinematic and emotive environments, where the
viewer emerges as a voyeur or an intruder of the unsettling makeshift spaces.
Michael Wann’s work is exclusively drawing
based. His work has been selected for the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Annual
Exhibition since 2004, where in 2006 he was awarded the AXA Insurance Drawing
Prize and in 2016 the ESB Sean Keating Prize and RHA Silver Medal. In 2010
Hughie O’Donoghue selected Michael’s work fro the Tom Caldwell Drawing Prize
and the Rowel Friers Perpetual Trophy at the Royal Ulster Academy’s 129th
Annual Exhibition. In 2013 he was awarded a merit prize by the trustees of the
Godlen Fleece, and in 2019 his work was selected for exhibition in New York by
the US branch of the Florence Academy. His work forms part of public and
private collections in Ireland, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia,
New Zealand and the United States.
Colleeen Quinn Rhiannon Salisbury Julia Silvester Michael Wann
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