Rick Janson Art Studio

I’m totally addicted to the UK Sky Arts duo of Landscape Artist of the Year and Portrait Artist of the Year. As Frank Skinner, the original co-presenter of the shows said, “I love the idea that you can make great entertainment out of watching paint dry.”

If you are an artist or would be artist, it is a masterclass in and of itself. I have made changes to my own process from watching this show.

I feel sorry for the often amiable judges who no doubt endure ridicule and criticism for some of their decisions, albeit some of it deserved. That ridicule often comes from the co-presenters, who are sometimes baffled by their choices. Dame Joan Bakewell, one of the recent co-presenters, once suggested they may be trying to be the cool kids in their choice of winner. She looked incredulous at their pick.

I couldn’t watch the final program of the 2024 season when a young artist named Brogan Bertie won the competition. The season concludes with the winner going off to fulfill a prestigious commission for some gallery or institution, usually for the sum of 10,000 pounds.

Bertie struggled in the heat and the finals to capture a likeness, what should be the starting point for a successful portrait. He also appeared to have issues with perspective and proportion. Judge Tai Shan Shierenburg gushed how they had discovered an important new artist, when I think most of the world just recoiled, especially given it was by no reasonable means the best work of the competition.

I just couldn’t watch Bertie take on the commission. It felt like a betrayal. I noticed on one art BLOG that they thought it was too early to bestow such a recognition on an artist that young, especially when what he was doing was not so unique. In each episode the sitter gets to chose one of the paintings to take home. In this final, with Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne posing together, the couple tellingly didn’t pick Bertie’s work.

The format of the show is quite simple. In both cases a group of artists selected by a submission piece compete against each other in heats, allowed four hours to come up with a piece of work in front of the cameras.

Each heat in both shows has one winner go forward to the semi-finals. Most choose to paint, but the show has also had print makers, collage artists and many who chose to draw in various medium, including fabric, charcoal and coloured pencil.

In portrait artist, each episode the artists are broken into three groups of three to paint a specific celebrity sitter in a studio environment. Before a winner is decided, the celebrity sitters get to choose a portrait to take home with them.

In landscape artist, the competitors move around Britain to paint en plein air. In addition to six chosen competitors, the landscape program also includes about 50 so-called “wild card artists,” who are present to paint nearby the official group. At each heat an additional winner is selected among the wild cards, then from that group one is chosen by the judges to join the official competition at the semi-finals.

In both shows, from the semi-finals three artists are chosen to go forward to the finals, which also require an additional piece done with more time, kind of a homework assignment. The final winner gets the commission, of which a separate show is made about that process.

The judges do say odd things sometimes. Last night we watched one of the older landscape series. Shierenberg has a well-known aversion to things he describes as “chocolate box,” including boats and (in landscapes) people. He uses the word “twee” often. This gets particularly challenging when they set the competition in harbours or areas with lots of people roaming around, such as the episodes set along the waterfront in Liverpool.

In this particular episode, set at Chartwell House (former home of Winston Churchill) and its magnificent gardens in Kent, the sun was out, everybody looked happy, and the scenery was stunning. Surprisingly, one judge expressed disappointment that the watercolorist had not replicated the mood of her submission piece, feeling it could have been more creepy. Shierenberg took predictable issue with two figures in another painting that in my view gave it some scale as well as helped balance out the composition. Neither won that heat. To use one of their own overworked expressions, but what about a good honest bit of painting? What’s the point of plunking six artists plus another 50 in that kind of landscape then fault them for painting what they see and feel? One gets the distinct impression that they don’t do joy — after all, this is Britain.

As Shierenberg was going on about the figures in the one painting, comedian Stephen Mangan humorously suggested that the painting was still wet, they could simply wipe them out with a cloth. Easy! I suspect Mangan had written into his contract the ability to take the piss out of the judges when necessary.

These shows have been going for more than a decade now. It has crossed my mind that maybe they should be changing up the judging, but I do like the exchanges between the three judges: Kate Bryan, Kathleen Soriano and Shierenberg. They themselves are integral to the personality of the show and seem to have some self awareness when they cross the line into pretension.

Of course it is absolutely silly for artists to compete against one another, especially when they use different medium. But hats off to Sky for bringing a lot of attention to the visual arts in Britain through these programs. It gets people talking about art.

I have watched enough of the show now that I have a really good track record of predicting the winner of each heat, many of which I would choose myself.

Surprisingly, despite the judges, sometimes the works that emerge are truly joyful. It may not be the choice of the cool kids, but it still speaks to many people. It doesn’t have to look like a chocolate box to be joyful.

The other thing I like to remind my spouse, who watches it with me, is that we are only seeing the work mediated by television, not in the flesh. Most artworks looks very different in person, which is why you should still go to galleries. It also makes it more difficult for us to second guess the choices. But Brogan Bertie? Ugh.

Speaking of landscapes, today’s painting from my archive is another from my series of cafes, this one from John’s Italian on Baldwin Street in Toronto. As an epidemic of loneliness spreads in North America, seeing people clustered together and having a great time is a tonic. You might even call it joyful (wink, wink). This painting was one of a series I did exploring Baldwin Street, which used to be my destination for lunch-time walks while working downtown on Adelaide Street East in downtown Toronto.

In Canada you can watch both series (Landscape and Portrait) on Amazon Prime. There was also briefly a spin-off Landscape Artist of the Year (Canada) with Sook-Yin Lee. It debuted just before COVID. Say no more. You can find it on Tubi.

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