Sponsored by Roger Markwick & Therese Doyle Awarded for an artistic work of high quality, in any medium, which depicts in a sympathetic manner the issue of mental well-being.
Judges' Comment:"Teeming with figures reminiscent of a vignette from a James Ensor painting (“Self-Portrait With Masks,” “Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889”), this painting contains many actors and might be interpreted broadly within the framework of mental well-being.The work hints at various psychic and emotional realms of the self, and self in relation to others, with its title “Out of the Darkness” signposting both individual and collective emergence from those darker spaces and places."
Judges' Comment: "This is a rather enigmatic painting with an elusive title that has intrigued the judges. An ambiguous, monolithic red form (a mask, a rock-form, a petal?) contrasts with a smaller but still larger-than-life-sized tortoise. It is well painted, and it is well-composed, but it is the greater mystery of the work—a desire to understand its full meaning—that has brought this work (in the spirit of the tortoise and the hare) to the finish line."
