Clara Drummond’s portrait of her friend wins BP Portrait Award 2016

Last night, Cambridgeshire-based artist Clara Drummond was announced as this year’s winner of the BP Portrait Award. Clara’s portrait Girl in a Liberty Dress depicts her friend and fellow artist Kristy Buchanan.

The artist was selected for the BP Portrait Award in 2013 and 2014 for portraits of the same sitter, but it was this third painting of Kristy that scooped the £30,000 prize. Judges, who included artist Jenny Saville and writer Alan Hollinghurst, were impressed by “the portrait’s skilful execution and its subtle and enigmatic qualities.”

This year the award received more than 2,500 portraits from 80 countries and once again artists were able to submit their work digitally making the competition more accessible to painters around the globe.

Second place went to Chinese artist Bo Wang, who was awarded £10,000 for his painting Silence, an emotional portrait of his grandmother lying on her hospital bed a month before she died. Third prize of £8,000 went to Suffolk-based artist Benjamin Sullivan for Hugo, a painting of the poet Hugo Williams painting in the study of his Islington Home. The BP Young Artist Award was awarded to British artist Jamie Coreth for Dad Sculpting Me. The prize of £7,000 is selected from entrants aged between 18 and 30.

The portraits can be seen at the National Portrait Galley when the BP Portrait Award 2016 exhibition opens Thursday 23 June until 4 September 2016.