Three Artists Longlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize

Three artists represented by New Blood Art – Nicola Wiltshire, Arlene Sharp and Ruth Bateman – have each been longlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize this year, an international painting competition that receives thousands of submissions from artists around the world.

While their approaches are very different, there is an interesting thread that connects them. Each turns to the natural world as a source of inspiration. Nicola Wiltshire draws on everyday observation – woodland walks, flowers from the garden and the landscapes glimpsed from a train window – translating these moments through vivid colour and the tactile surface of patterned fabric. Arlene Sharp’s paintings evolve from direct encounters with landscape; through walking, sketching and layered painting processes she captures the shifting light, colour and form of places she knows well. Ruth Bateman’s landscapes move further inward, emerging from memory and emotion to create spaces that sit somewhere between real places and imagined ones.

It is striking how often contemporary painters are returning to nature at the moment. In different ways, each of these artists uses landscape as a way to explore experience, memory and the feeling of being in the natural world.

View available work by these three artists here