The Jerwood Drawing Prize

The Jerwood Drawing Prize is coming to Leeds. This is a terrific resource for all of you interested in the state of contemporary drawing. It will be on at the Tetley from 16th January to 1st March 2015.

The Jerwood Drawing Prize is one of the most important events in the British drawing year. It’s open to all artists resident in the UK and has prizes for both students and professional artists. In particular it offers two student awards of £2,000 each. See

So it might be an idea to put work in for next year’s exhibition.

It’s also worth a look at some of the past exhibitors:

The Jerwood likes to stretch the definitions of drawing so you often get artists working on the edge of the discipline; for instance this work by James Eden & Olly Brooks.  ‘Burst’, is a film of graphite balloon bursts lasting 5mins and 15 secs. Balloons are filled with graphite dust and burst, the resulting film being submitted as a drawing.

James Eden & Olly Brooks: Burst

 

Gary Lawrence was a first prize winner with Homage to Anonymous in 2011. His large 4 foot by 6 foot drawing was packed with intense detail and all done in biro.

Gary Lawence: Homage to Anonymous

 

James Allen's drawings are direct observations of people and architecture and he uses the properties of charcoal to be rubbed out and reasserted to deal with a visual representation of time passing.

James Allen

The 2012 First Prize winner was a hand-drawn animation made by Karolina Glusiec. You can see a trailer for her animation here.

The point is that there is no house style or particular type of drawing that wins. The Jerwood supports the idea of drawing as a broad church. If you are going to put work in, the handing in for judgeing is usually at Wimbledon College of Art, so I'm afraid you would need to think about extra costs in terms of travel as well as presentation and fee. However to get selected is wonderful for your CV.