The Artist Purchase Prize & The Artist Exhibition Award
Hilary Carr Wonder, oil, 19¼x17in (49x43cm).
‘I live and work in north-west England and central France. I paint almost exclusively in oil, having come to prefer working with the nuances of what I see over a longer time, with always the option of scraping it off. I paint flower and still-life subjects, in the studio and en plein air, and have always been interested in dereliction and decay in one form or another. In the studio I sometimes let the set ups stay for a few weeks to age naturally. This is the third of three paintings of a rose in a glass, and I like the way the flower changes into something else as the water evaporates and time passes. It challenges the idea of beauty only being found in the fresh and the new.