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‘Saatchi Schools Art Prize’
Telegraph report Click here...
Saatchi Gallery Click here...
Julia Whiting, a student from St Margaret’s School Exeter, attended the Prize Giving Ceremony at the Saatchi Gallery having received the exciting news that she has been short-listed in an international competition for under-18s.
The winners of the 2011 Saatchi Gallery / Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, were announced at this ceremony on 17 January 2012.
Colin Grassie, CEO of sponsors Deutsche Bank UK stood at the centre of an uneven circle of eagerly attentive students, their families, teachers and arts administrators which included Ian MacGregor, editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Rebecca Wilson, Director of London's world famous Saatchi Gallery. Throughout the elegant gallery space, lit up now by an array of the twenty short-listed works from the twelve thousand who had entered this year's international competition, there were hearts, young and old, beating faster.
‘And the winner of this year's Saatchi Gallery Sunday Telegraph Prize for Schools is ...’ (Colin Spoke the words, the theatrical silence said 'it's all or nothing now') ... ‘Julia Whiting from St Margaret's School in Exeter!’
She received £2,000 and the school's art department was awarded £10,000 to spend on art and computer equipment.
Julia, an eighteen-year-old Art Foundation student now at Falmouth Art College, had produced her beautiful prize-winning work as the culmination of her A Level coursework. An extensive yearlong study of the natural world brought her back to the familiar and her love of particular trees inhabiting the landscape near her home in East Devon. Julia had photographed the trees extensively, but acting on her teachers’ advice, Julia took the more uncomfortable route of sitting and drawing the trees en plein aire. And it was from these drawings that Julia committed endless hours, sitting in The Arthouse, ground-floor studio, layering expertly chosen tapered wedges of modulated tones of Indian ink with her Chinese brushes.
Julia’s exquisite large-scale Indian ink drawings of trees must have caught the eye of judges. These ambitious pieces speak eloquently of her skill and her ambition. Each of the three trees, set on a ten-foot by four-foot sheet of heavyweight cartridge paper, is rendered in delicate washes of ink applied in wedges of graduated tone, using Chinese brushes. Presented as an installation of hung works, the viewer is encouraged to walk between the trees to gain access to further paintings and studies.
As the Saatchi award showed, she had pulled off that most difficult of tricks: to produce an elegant work that had the presence to inhabit a vast gallery space, while rewarding close attention by the exquisite use of a sensitively handled material. The scale demonstrated ambition; the handling spoke of commitment and consummate skill.
The artist’s lot is invariably solitary, but on the 17th January 2012, Julia suddenly had an audience, the family was in raptures, the crowd applauded with genuine enthusiasm and cameras flashed in her direction. Much-deserved reward for such a dedicated young artist: now with a future opening up before her.
St Margaret’s student Julia achieved an A* grade at A Level in Art and Design in 2011 and is currently in the middle of an Art Foundation course at Falmouth. It caught her by surprise in December when she heard that her A Level coursework, a large installation of three ink drawings of trees, had been short-listed for one of the most prestigious student Art prizes in the world. When asked what her initial reaction was, Julia said she was ‘Surprised, because I didn’t know my work had been entered! Obviously I was thrilled too’.
Speaking about the subject matter Julia said: ‘My idea was to use a poignant memory, which in my case was of the trees on a childhood walk and create a sense of space to involve the viewer by representing this experience.’
For now though, the very modest Julia is just thrilled to be chosen from such a large field:
The panel of judges was: the artist Marc Quinn, the children's author Kaye Umansky, Alistair Hicks, Deutsche Bank art advisor and curator, Alastair Smart, arts editor of The Sunday Telegraph, and Rebecca Wilson, director, Saatchi Gallery.
An exhibition of the 20 shortlisted entries is at the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York's Sq, King's Road, London SW3 4SQ from 17-23 January 2012.
Many recent A Level graduates from St Margaret’s School have made their way to the top art colleges in the land: Chelsea, Central St Martin’s, The London College of Communications, Camberwell, Wimbledon, Goldsmith’s, Falmouth, Bristol and more. These are young lives inspired with an enthusiasm for art, now doing specialist degree courses in Fine Art, Ceramics, Graphic Design, Photography, Film and Television, Costume Design, Jewellery and Architecture.
Among the supporters of the St Margaret’s Art Department over recent times is the one of the UK’s finest artists, Devon-based sculptor Peter Randall-Page. He has estimated that this ‘… must be one of the best art departments in the country’.
For the third year running photographs of A Level and AS artworks had been posted by the department on the Saatchi Gallery website. With such a large international entry, department staff saw this as an important showcase for their students’ talent. Having added the photographs to the website in the summer, it took everyone by surprise when St Margaret’s staff were contacted by Francesca Wilson from the Saatchi Gallery Education Department in the middle of December, to invite them to bring the artwork to London.
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