Sikelela Owen’s Knitting has won this year’s Charles Wollaston Award, the most prestigious prize of the Royal Academy’s (RA) Summer Exhibition. The portrait, an oil-on-canvas portrayal of her mother, originated from a photograph of her mother sitting on a bench in Bristol. ‘It’s one that I’ve looked at since I was a child,’ she said, ‘and I just, all of a sudden, felt compelled to develop it into a painting.’ That compulsion has yielded a prize of £34,000.
Sikelela Owen's painting, 'Knitting'.
Sikelela Owen and her mother, celebrating her winning the prize with a trip to the RA.
The award was established in 1978 after a donation from Charles Wollaston, who was a long-time supporter of the RA and an enthusiastic lecturer on art. After his death, the RA received a substantial bequest that allowed it to endow the prize in perpetuity. This year’s judges were the British printmaker and RA president Rebecca Salter, the writer and critic Olivia Laing, artist Hew Locke and author Elif Shafak.
Other prizes awarded for this year’s Summer Exhibition include The AXA Art Prize (£10,000) for ‘an outstanding work of figurative art’. This went to Miho Sato for her painting Windy Day 2. The Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture (£10,000) was awarded to Zatorski + Zatorski, the London-based collaborative artists and ‘life-partners’, who created a piece made up of 101 white rat pelts which have been filled with 24-carat gold. It is simply titled I, and is being sold for £85,000 — a bargain for all those rats, if you have a coffee table big enough.
Zatorski + Zatorski's sculpture, 'I'
That's a lot of golden rats...
Winsome Yuen won The British Institution Fund Award for Students (£5,000) for her piece, Superstition. Further prizes were awarded to Steven Dixon, who won The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize, and Anousha Payne, whose ‘self-portrait as a horse’ impressed judge Rebecca Lucy Taylor (best known as the musical artist Self Esteem). Frances Featherstone won The Maire Ragnhild Hollingsworth Prize for Oil Painting, Trevor Price won The Viking Prize for Print and Emmanuel Awuni was awarded The Arts Club Award.
All of the pieces are on display at the Summer Exhibition, which is open to the public until August 17. The Exhibition was one of the founding principles of the RA which stated it would ‘mount an annual exhibition open to all artists of distinguished merit’ to finance the training of young artists in the Royal Academy Schools. It has been held each year since 1769 and is the largest open submission contemporary arts show in the world.
Speaking about her Charles Wollaston Award win, Owen said she was inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s A Lady Walking in a Garden with a Child when painting Knitting. Diego Velázquez is another of her inspirations, as is Edgar Degas and Kerry James Marshall.
Thomas Gainsborough's painting 'A Lady Walking in a Garden with a Child'.
She said she was surprised to win the prize, ‘because, I guess it feels like quite a quiet painting to me’. ‘It’s one I’m very proud of, but it’s really quite a quiet one to me, so I was super pleased to find that they liked and connected with it.’ She added that ‘winning the prize still feels quite overwhelming’, but with a young family herself, the prize money is very meaningful ‘in the sense that it gives me nursery fees and allows me more time in the studio.’
The Royal Academy of Art's Summer Exhibition runs until August 17.
-
A light-filled waterside home for sale for the first time in over half a century, set in the idyllic spot where the New Forest meets the South CoastLittle Aston is a graceful, charming home with superb gardens and its own orchard, as well as some of the south coast's most beautiful areas right on its doorstep. Penny Churchill takes a look.
-
'Just look at those stairs. Just as an art form, they are bewitching, like the shell of a nautilus': The lure of buying a stairway to heavenIt seems like madness to buy a house purely because you fall in love with the staircase — but sometimes, they are simply so beautiful that it's impossible to resist. Toby Keel takes a look at some glorious examples of staircases we've seen in Country Life in the last couple of years.
-
Sophia Money-Coutts: Is there even any point in setting an out of office, these days?Setting an out of office email only to reply anyway is a vicious cycle, writes our columnist.
-
The truth about P.G. Wodehouse: Robert Daws on playing England's greatest comic writerThe actor Robert Daws starred alongside Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in Jeeves and Wooster back in the 1990s, and the work of P.G. Wodehouse has been part of his decades-long career ever since. He joined the Country Life Podcast.
-
The teeny tiny car that you absolutely don’t need, but will absolutely want this summer — and it has an inbuilt showerThe Fiat Topolino has been reimagined by French swimwear brand Vilebrequin just in time for the summer holidays.
-
What everyone is talking about this week: Are people marrying younger?Week in, week out, Will Hosie rounds up the hottest topics on everyone's lips, in London and beyond.
-
Small engines, big batteries: The quiet revolution of car designMore and more cars on the road are electric, and some unusual shapes and sizes glide past silently. But what does it all mean for design?
-
You can’t always rely on the Great British summer — but you can rely on its watchesBritish watchmakers have excelled themselves in recent months — releasing bright and beautiful timepieces that you'll want on your wrist through summer, and beyond.
-
No strings attached: A brief history of swimwear, from heavy skirts of linen linked to women's drownings, to the skimpy two-piece named after a nuclear weapons siteFrom knee-length numbers to a scandalous suit denounced by the Pope, the colourful history of swimwear has been brought to life by a glamorous London exhibition.
-
Downtown Abbey is about to finish forever, and you're about to get a chance to see — and to buy — the costumes from the showDownton Abbey's exquisite costumes and props are going on show at a free exhibition ahead of a sale being held by Bonhams later this summer.
