I guess everyone has those times when things just don’t go according to plan. Well, it’s been happening to us too, and the result is that the eagerly awaited EAC Over 60s Art Awards 2010 have just become the EAC Over 60s Art Awards 2010-2011.

Why?

It all started with a discussion in May, about how we might develop the Art Awards; about how we might do things differently in order to improve them and also make them attractive to a wider range of people.

We considered:

• Entry Fees – could we reduce them, at the same time weighing up the likelihood that sponsorship is likely to be very difficult to come by this year?
• Website Development – last year, 28% of entries came in online, and during the voting for The EAC People’s Choice Award, over 100,000 web pages were viewed from 50 countries. How could we encourage more artists to participate in the competition online?
• EAC Creative Awards? Why does EAC restrict itself to ‘Art Awards’? Why not broaden out to celebrate creativity across the Arts?
• Exhibition Venue – transport links make a London exhibition the most convenient for the greatest number, but ought we to be looking at moving the exhibition out of London, both for considerations of cost, as well as of inclusivity?

But it’s the exhibition venue that has caused the rethink and the delay. Over the last 3 months we have looked at, contacted, and/or visited what must be approaching 100 venues up and down the country. We’ve approached community spaces, town halls, public and private galleries, National Trust venues, hotels, temporary exhibition spaces in vacant shops, cathedrals, corporate head-offices….in London, Birmingham, Bath, Leeds etc etc…. you name it, we’ve tried it! But frustratingly, and surprisingly, to us at least, to no avail. Reluctantly, we have admitted defeat in the quest to find the perfect venue, at reasonable rates, in time for a December 2010 exhibition, which had been our preferred option.

But not defeat overall, as we are committed to making the 2010 Art Awards happen…even if they have to overlap into 2011!  We are therefore continuing our search for a venue over the next few weeks, and with a longer lead-in time to a Spring Exhibition, we are confident  that the perfect place will materialise. This is where you might also be able to help. EAC has a loyal following of thousands of artists who might just know the very place to hold the 17^th EAC Art Awards Exhibition. If so, we would delighted to hear from you. (As many of you will know, we need a gallery space for up to 150 exhibits, with good access and reasonable transport links. We have a gallery spec with further details, if you would kindly take the time to contact us.)

So what will happen now?

Whist we have been on the quest for that elusive venue, we have also been updating our website. Rather than delay any further, we will make the www.eacartawards.org.uk website live from 29th July 2010. This will carry all up-to-date info and news over the coming weeks, and is also set up to accept online entries and postal entries immediately, should any intrepid and extremely keen artists feel so inclined. We will also be in touch by post for those without internet access. Hard copy publicity and entry forms will follow later, once venue and dates are clarified.

Meanwhile, making the most of the opportunity of the rescheduled Art Awards 2010, why not enter our first EAC Photography competition?

The Bath Prize (see www.thebathprize.co.uk) welcomes entries from painters visiting Bath during June, July and August. Painters may submit as many works as they wish but the first entry must have been inspired by a specific location  in  the Georgian city. This location  is allocated by ballot when the entry is received. Sponsored by The Bath Gallery, the competition is open to both professional and amateur painters, who will be encouraged to work on the streets, en plein air, but they can also sketch or photograph their subject and complete the work elsewhere.

Entries for the competition close on August 23rd.

Our apologies to David Collett who requested our help in publicizing this really unusual and interesting competition many weeks ago. You may feel it is now rather short-notice to submit entries this year, but you may wish to view entries online or visit the  exhibition of finalists’ work which takes place in September.

Mary Roscoe lives in Prescot, Merseyside, and was a finalist in the 2009 EAC’s Over 60s Art Awards. You can see her in the 2009 video on the Home page.
In Spring 2010, I went to visit her, and am I glad I did! Little did I realise, as I stood on her doorstep, what a magical hour I was about to spend in the company of a most unusual and talented artist.

"The Cornfield" after Monet

 I had been entranced by the intricacy of Mary’s work at the 2009 Bankside Gallery, exhibition, but her miniature, ‘The Trellis’, depicting a flower-bordered garden path, didn’t prepare me the exuberance, vitality and sheer variety of embroideries displayed on every wall in her house. Galloping horses, football fans, pigeons, dogs, Buckingham Palace garden parties, impressionist landscapes and figures; they’re all there, lining the stairs, down the hall, around the lounge, in the bedrooms, and some, sadly, relegated to the garage.

  "The Charge of the Light Brigade"

Each of Mary’s embroideries take hours, if not months to complete, and one famously, ‘Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Garden Party’ (after Sargant) took a full year. Starting with a piece of white cotton material – and Mary admits to using up old sheets and pillowcases in her time – she traces the outlines of her design, and then uses a box of children’s watercolours to paint in the blocks of colour. Finally, using sewing cottons, Mary starts to sew, always starting at the top and working down the picture. She uses three basic stitches in her work; French knots, straight stitches, and occasionally chain stitch. As she works, the picture seems to come to life, building a 3D effect with the depth and colour mix of French knots, often using two colours of thread in the needle.
One corner of Mary’s dining room is an Aladdin’s cave, with the raw materials of her work, over 650 reels of sewing cotton, tantalisingly stored in racks of B&Q mini-drawer sets intended for screws and nuts and bolts! Sitting in her chair, with the window behind her, and working for hours every day when the light is good enough, Mary works her magic!

  "Queen Victoria's Jubilee Garden Party"

She has had no formal training in art or embroidery, but always made her own clothes as a youngster, remembering sewing up dresses from Lewis’s remnants on her treadle sewing machine on a Saturday afternoon, and then wearing them to go out on Saturday night. Later, she took up painting, but was inspired to try embroidery in 1982, after a visit to a local exhibition. Her first picture was a copy of Monet’s ‘Harmony in Green’. 150 pictures and nearly 30 years later, the evidence of Mary’s ‘obsession’, as she has been known to call her love of embroidery, is all around me as I am privileged with a tour round her private collection.

    "Manchester United Coming Home, 1999"

Well, I know we did promise to have the Art Awards preview event video and photos uploaded onto the Art Awards website before Christmas, but apologies to those of you who’ve been waiting and watching. It was like this, you see……

First of all, yours sincerely flew off for a week to the warm and sunny climes of Andalucia, before the Art Awards exhibition was even finished, and then, landing back in cold and grey Britain, a certain natural sloth took over. You’ll therefore, I trust, be delighted to hear that normal service is about to be resumed.

Today the draft film of the preview event has arrived, and the photos are on the way to being edited and captioned. We hope you’ll be really delighted with them, those of you who attended the event, and also hopefully, those who weren’t able to, as they give you the flavour of a most special day.

We will, however, have to ask for your help with a number of the photos, where unfortunately, even putting our heads together, we were not able to name all the people. So, it’s a do-it-yourself job! Please contact me where you can put names to those pictures that are uncaptioned; I’ll be very grateful.

So…what’s the time–scale?

Hopefully by Christmas Eve, the video will be uploaded onto the Art Awards website under Galleries/Videos, whilst the photos will have a link from the Home Page to a Picasa web album, which will play the photos individually, or in a slideshow. If we miss Christmas Eve….  you’d better just get on and have a wonderful and very happy Christmas, and hope we do better in the New Year! An Art Awards 2009 newsletter will also be out in the New Year, viewable on the website, and also intended to be posted out to those without internet access.

With very best wishes from all at EAC. Have a very happy Christmas.

The 2009 EAC Art Awards exhibition opened on Tuesday 1st December, at The Bankside Gallery, in perfect December weather.
It was fascinating to see the real artworks for the first time, after many, many days of viewing them online. On the whole, the colour reproduction online was remarkably accurate, with one or two notable exceptions, but nothing can prepare one for the size and drama of some of the artworks: Richard Benjamin’s  “Big Market Newcastle”, Hugh Cannings’  “A Shop in Provence,  Mick Beale’s “Forest Walk”, Nickie Jones’ “Sophie”, and Valerie Biddulph’s “Untitled 1” , to mention just five, were all larger than life and so much more eye-catching than they had even been on screen.
Other artworks were far more intimate and required the viewer to get up very close to appreciate the fine detail, eg. three very different but beautifully intricate embroideries, by Judy Dames, Mary Roscoe and Joan Speare.

This year EAC arranged for professional filming and photography of the event, and a number of the afternoon and evening visitors were interviewed about their work. The resulting video and photographic record will be made available on the website before Christmas.

The following prizes were awarded during the evening event:
The Girlings Prize for Landscape / Seascape to Alan Bowering for “Tranquillity – Mevagissey”
The Caring Homes Prize for Still Life to Judy Dames, for “ A Beane not Open, a Beane Open”
The Peverel Prize for Watercolour to Barbara Hughes for “Dubrovnik, Pearl of the Adriatic”
The EAC Prize for Drawing to Nancy Howie for “Ex Libris”
The EAC Prize for Oil Painting to Sarah Maria Rhys for “Last Dance”
The EAC Prize for Portraiture to Sandra Smith-Gordon for “Self Portrait at 70”
The EAC Prize for 3D work to Jeff Perks for “Chicken in a Basket”
The EAC Prize for Photography to Carol Allen for “The Point””
The Leisure Painter Subscription Prize to Gillian Flack for “Onions and Blue Vase”
The Artist Subscription Prize to Brian Collins for “A Shady Spot, Luxor”,
The Earnley Concourse Prize to William Belshaw for “Making Sandcastles”
The EAC People’s Choice Award to Gordon Morley for “Downham Village, Lancashire”,
The Angela Farnell Memorial Prize to Richard Benjamin for “Big Market, Newcastle”.

Our grateful thanks to all our prize sponsors - Abbeyfield, Girlings Retirement Options, Caring Homes, Peverel Retirement, Earnley Concourse, The Artist and Leisure Painter magazines - for their generosity, and particularly to Abbeyfield for also sponsoring the preview event.

This, the 16th EAC Art Awards is proving itself to be a resounding success, with one of the highest entry rates in recent years, and the high standard of work, as always, impressing and delighting all those who participate, not only by visiting the real exhibition in London, but also by viewing online.

And the fun is not over yet! Keep your eyes on the website. The new video of the preview event, and a selection of photos will shortly be uploaded.

Don’t forget, you can still visit the exhibition between now and Sunday 6th December. The Bankside Gallery is open from 11am until 6pm each day and admission is free. The closest tube station is Southwark.

A number of pictures are already sold, but it is still possible to buy excellent original works at very reasonable prices!

Voting in the EAC People’s Choice Award ends at 9pm sharp, on Monday 30th November. The website page, ‘Vote Online ’ may still be visible after this time, and votes may still be accepted by the website, but we won’t be counting them in to the overall calculation. So, please ensure that you cast your votes in good time.

Also, to clarify; the winner of the EAC People’s Choice Award will be the artist with the most points overall. The actual number of votes received are not significant in deciding the winner.

Thank you to all those who have visited the website and voted, and also to those who spent time contributing comments to individual artists’ pages. There have now been  89,348 page views since 9th November, 2920 votes cast, and 840 comments submitted.

Enjoy the last two days voting!

There are now only 5 days of voting to go in the EAC People’s Choice Award. 2405 votes have been cast, and 750 comments submitted, with 77,620 page views on the site since 9th November when the online voting was launched. We are absolutely astounded and delighted at the take-up!

Voting will end at 9pm on Monday 30th November, so that those who wish to watch the exciting conclusion don’t have to stay up half the night to do so.  The winner of the EAC People’s Choice Award will be presented with his or her well-earned prize, at the preview event at The Bankside Gallery, London, on Tuesday evening, 1st December.

In a previous blog, I remarked that “the Top 5 have been remarkably stable”. No longer! Gordon Morley’s “Downham Village” has been knocked off its first position by the original front runner, Gerald Hudson’s “Venice”. Meanwhile, Nickie Jones’s “Sophie” first entered the Top 10 six days ago, and has moved steadily up the ranking, until it is now challenging the top 3.

It’s going to be a very interesting five days!

On a practical note, it would seem that 1350 people have registered on the site, but not all have yet voted. Some may be saving their votes for the last few days, but others may have experienced problems verifying their email accounts and or passwords. If this is the case, please contact us, using the ‘Contact Us’ page on the website. For those not too familiar with computer logging in and emails, please be very careful to type in your exact email address; one wrong letter and the system won’t work.

Lastly, a big thank you to all those who have shown such an interest in the EAC Art Awards, taken the time to vote, and most particularly, to submit comments on the 101 art works on view from this year’s competition. Some commentators have been generous enough to offer feedback on almost every page, and we feel sure that the praise, support and encouragement have been highly valued by the artists themselves.

The brand new EAC People’s Choice Award, which will be awarded for the first time in 2009, looks set to be a very popular addition to the EAC Over 60s Art Awards prize-giving ceremony, to be held this year at the Bankside Gallery on 1st December.

There have now been 12 full days of busy online voting, with another 9 to go before voting closes late on Monday 30th November.

There are 101 finalists’ artworks in the online gallery, representing painting, drawing, print-making, collage, photography, textiles, sculpture, glass and enamel-work, with artists' ages ranging from 60 to 95.

So, where’s the voting up to?

1931 votes have now been cast and 456 comments posted.

There have been 4,600 visits to the website since 9th November when the online voting was launched, and 62,090 page views, indicating a healthy interest in the website, which is very encouraging for the future.

The Top 5 have been remarkably stable almost from the beginning, with Gordon Morley’s “Downham Village” currently established in 1st position, just ahead of Gerald Hudson’s “Venice”, and Diana Hudson’s “ Big Ambitions”. (they are not related, as far as I know) However, with nine days to go, anything can still happen; strong contenders that have suddenly appeared in the Top 10 over the last week include Joan Speare’s “Van Gogh Landscape” and Nickie Jones’s “Sophie” and if they have done it, so can others.

Thank you to all those who have voted and particularly to those who have also taken time to add a comment. Many finalists have themselves visited the site and offered feedback on others’ work, which must be the best kind of support for artists themselves.

One thing that the website might develop before next year is the capacity to offer a forum, where artists can hold a two way conversation, whereas this year there is only the facility to comment on individual art works….and to read this blog. So, as a half-way measure, how about using the Contact Us page on the website to submit more general reflections, comments, suggestions, ideas (constructive please!) and I’ll include them in several blogs that I’ll post over the next week.

Meanwhile, it may be raining outside, but enjoy the art gallery inside, and take the opportunity to vote in the next few days. It may well get very busy over next weekend.

After only five full days of voting, and with another 16 still to go, it is clear that most of The Art Awards Team’s worries had been needless.
· Would enough people visit the site to vote?
· Would three weeks be long enough to allow people time to vote?
· Would the voting system work smoothly?
· Would enough constructive comments be posted to encourage the artists whose work is displayed there?

We now have the answers. So far, 992 votes have been cast, and 222 comments posted on the site. Only 3 people have reported meeting any problems in voting, and they were later sorted. Each and every comment posted, (and all are moderated before being uploaded onto the artist’s page) has been positive. What a wonderful response!
There are also some clear front-runners for the EAC People’s Choice Award, which will be awarded on the 1st December at the Bankside Gallery.

So, what do we do in the next two weeks, till voting closes on 30th November?

We have a few suggestions.
· In the first rush of enthusiasm, a surprising number of people have only cast one vote for their first choice. It may be someone they know, and we all like to support friends, family, residents and so on. However, now there is more time, those with unallocated 2nd and 3rd choice votes, might take the time to browse the excellent works of art displayed on the website, and select two more artists to receive their votes.
· Many of the artists whose work has been selected for exhibition are not on the internet and may not have seen their work celebrated online. If you know of anyone in this position, or indeed know older people who would enjoy viewing the online gallery, please invite them in!
· Out of the 222 comments received, nearly half of them are about the current Top 10. But that means that another 91 works are sharing only just over 100 comments between them. It’s early days yet, so again, there’s time to browse the gallery and compliment the many talented artists whose work is on display there. You can comment on as many works as you wish. You are not limited to three, as you are with voting.

Lots to do and still 16 days to do it in.
Happy Voting and Commenting!

PS. How could I have forgotten? How wonderful to have received comments from France, Canada, USA, and Australia. Please do identify in your comments where you come from. It adds to the interest. Also many thanks also to finalists who have been very generous in their comments about other people's work. Your feedback must be doubly valuable to other artists.

Well, it happened. As promised, yesterday 9th November, in the late afternoon, www.eacartawards.org.uk launched its online voting for the EAC People’s Choice Award 2009, and, it would seem, brought about the site’s busiest day ever – busier even than the results day over a week ago!
Already voting is very lively, and a number of very appreciative comments have been posted.
Voting has just 22 days to run in total, before the winner of the online competition is declared at the exhibition preview on 1st December.
So, take this opportunity to vote. You don’t have to be a finalist, or even an artist. You just have to know what you like and most of us do that when it comes to art! So go ahead and enjoy voting, and don’t forget to post some comments about as many works of art as you wish, while you’re on the website. A complimentary and constructive comment might go a long way to encourage talent and renew energy, and it doesn’t cost anything!