Elizabeth scoops top art award

Brighton alumna Elizabeth McCarten (Fine Art Printmaking BA(Hons) 2012) has won the Jackson’s Young Artist Award in this year’s Sunday Times Watercolour Competition.

Elizabeth is also a Royal Drawing School graduate. She collected her £500 prize for her ethereal watercolour, The Boboli Gardens and was credited by Jackson’s Art Supplies for her “measured, understated” painting which is “peppered with a delicate decorative quality”.

 

Elizabeth, now based in London and teaching on the Young Artist Programme at The Royal Drawing School, recently completed a residency at Borgo Pignano in Italy and travelled to Florence to make a series of works, including her prizewinning watercolour painting.

About her time at the University of Brighton, Elizabeth said: “Brighton gave me a new sense of independence. Firstly because I had left London and was exploring a new city on my own for the first time and secondly because it helped develop a strong artistic independence and confidence within myself.

“Whilst the group critiques and tutorials could be tough and offered a sort of deadline or structure to the year, you were given your studio space and you just had to get on with it. I enjoyed this freedom of making the work according to my own schedule and the studios were always busy with exciting paintings and new ideas so I wanted to be there.

“I learnt how to be organised and develop a positive sense of ownership within my studio practise which kept me motivated throughout my degree and in a lot of ways prepped me for the future as well.”