The Hugh Casson Drawing Prize, as part of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2018, for an original work on paper in any medium, where the emphasis is clearly on drawing, was awarded to local artist, Society member and occasional contributor to the Newsletter, Mark Beesley. Mock Tudor shows twenty elevations of Arts & Crafts-style houses rendered in pen and crayon on tracing paper.

Mark says: “The work is based on a row of 1930s houses in a suburb of Nottingham, near where I used to live. They sum up to me the spirit of suburbia: a mixture of conformity – no-one has a better house than anyone else; they are of identical plan – and individuality: each has a different design for the pretend timber framing. The proud owner gets the best of both worlds: a mass-produced and therefore affordable house, close to the city, and an ‘olde worlde’ cottage, close to the countryside. There is the added dimension that all the houses have become more individual as they have been altered by their owners over the years.”

[markbeesleyart.com]