To ensure every genre of art is appreciated equally in our Jackson’s Open Painting Prize, we are awarding 6 Category Prizes to our 350 Longlisted works! Upon entering, artists had to tag their work the most appropriate subject matter, choosing between Portrait/Figure, Animals, Still life/Botanical, Abstract/Non-representational, Landscape/Cityscape/Seascape and Scenes of Everyday Life. Jackson’s Judging Panel will choose one winner from each category so that all Longlisted works can be judged against works with a similar subject matter, alongside being considered for the other prizes. All 6 category prize winners will win £500 and will automatically be placed in the Shortlist.
Landscape/Cityscape/Seascape Award Winner: ‘The circus within’ by Charlotte Brisland
Artist Description:
‘My body of work looks at overlooked spaces with a chocolate box aesthetic.
I am always looking for spaces which reflect a sense of isolation and displacement by living in cultures I feel are distant to me. My personal experiences in these landscapes are a sense of feeling removed and outside the everyday lives already established within them. The snapshots I select on these journeys are hidden and overlooked moments of suburbia or edge-lands and are often set in stunning mountainous backdrops. The locations of these landscapes are rarely named purposefully to maintain a sense of displacement.’
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Lisa Takahashi: Can you tell us about your ideas behind ‘The Circus Within’?
Charlotte Brisland: Each individual painting springs from so many thoughts which weave through my work overall. I was thinking a lot about how the landscape is a psychological reflection and considering how painting is fundamentally personal as much as it must be critical. For me, perception and painting are both about illusion, shifting autonomously all the time. I wanted to bring together elements of illusion in a single space. The circus can be interpreted as a space of farcical superficiality, while the sense of something more solid and real beneath that is always present. Reflections are elements which appear repeatedly in my work as they make me think of the idea of ‘the double’ in Freud’s thinking of the Uncanny, something real yet not real, some kind of a visual trick of light mimicking the other and more real solid object.
I noticed that the image was used for a CD cover. How did it feel to see your work associated with a particular kind of music and the ideas of another creative?
Yes, I was really pleased to have the work seen in this context. The title of the album is ‘Controlled Hallucination’ which I love, it connects so well to what I was considering while making this piece. Chris approached me after seeing the piece since he felt it connected to the ideas within his music. We have talked a lot since then about our work and about the autonomy involved in music and painting which we’ve both learned to trust.
What does winning this prize mean to you and how do you think it might affect your creativity?
It means a lot to me. There are moments for every artist of rejection and doubt which can be crippling if it goes on for lengthy spells. There is an innate drive within any artist who carries on throughout that and it’s to do with the fundamental need to simply make stuff. Getting something like this is a supportive voice from without just to say it’s looking alright and it really is so good to get that.
View more of Charlotte Brisland’s work on her website.
