Instantly engaging, with a tightly realized, knowledgeable use of colour and composition, Geoff Clark‘s Looking for Nemo is both a delightful and disaplined painting.  He bring you right into the moment, you can almost hear the girls giggling and exclaiming. ss the fish moving, the heads bobbing.

The strong yellows and blacks instantly give the painting a strong personality.  The pinks and blues pull the overall colour scheme into primary colours (some more modified, some less so) which is perfect for the primary school children as subjects.  The complementary touches (yellow-violet parings) provide additional emphasis, energy and dimension to the colour scheme.

While the compositional structure is very strong and simple, it is made more interesting by the deviations and variations, such as the child on the far left facting right and set slightly apart from the three girls whose faces we do not see; the multi=coloured hat, the butterfly vs the strong black and (almost) white stripes, and so on.  That’s the wonderful things about strong, regular structures: they allow you to really enjoy antything that varies by sensitizing you to them.

This charming, engaging and accomplished painting is awarded the MICHAEL HEPBURN award.

In Ciara Ward‘s Of Dangerous and Noble Things, we’re in a foggy forest, possibly having lost our way, and have come across these masked, mystical twins, maybe even interrupted them in the midst of some ritual.

This elegant photograph draws us into a narrative strongly hinted at by a limited number of mood-evoking and suggestive elements: fog, forest, masked women, candle, and long dresses.  Masks protect (especially these days!) and disguise, invoke and embody spirits in rituals – the viewer invents the narrative themeselves, based on the cues in the image and the viewer’s own experience and archetypal memory.

Ward has created a wonderful sense of atmosphere and more symbolic than specific sense of place, directing sharp focus on the masked women, vivid texture in the masks and strongest colour in the muted shock of red hair, composed very different lighting effects to build atmosphere and animate the characters.  The strong contrasts of skin and dresses emphasize the focal point of a formal and effective composition.

Magical vision skillfully and beautifully realized.