Alison Critchlow I have two bodies of work in process at the moment, unfolding simultaneously and at different timescales. The Swarm series began in 2023 and grew out of a research project focused on the work of Romanian American artist Hedda Sterne. It uses an imagined swarm as a motif to explore collective impulses that…
Ellen Ranson The physically powerful, expressive and emotionally charged works allow the artist’s emotions to transfer from body to canvas. A broad research base that includes feminist theory, mythology, memory, and landscape navigates the hallmarks of patriarchal art histories. Ranson subverts and intertwines these with references to feminine mythologies, everyday experience, and the often erased…
Joshua Uvieghara I make paintings driven by processes of assemblage and mark making. This begins with a question of reconciliation: How might the ineffable be expressed through the materiality of painting? While this question resists a fixed answer, it opens a space where painting becomes a process of discovery—a testing ground for thresholds between material,…
Sophia Rosenthal “Born in South Korea and raised in the Philippines before settling in the UK, I use paint as a language and vehicle for exploring memory and its complexities in relation to ideas around belonging, my identity and lived experience. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ texts Camera Lucida and the theory of the punctum, my…
Paul Smith Paul Smith is a London based artist from Sunderland. His work documents his interest in the lost and the found, what is passing out of memory and what is synthesized as trace in the landscape. Exploring lost places and capturing the essence of a moment of abandonment has been part of his practice…
Emma Tod Essay by Rebecca Geldard 2025 Emma Tod’s paintings might be described as an antidote to the digital experience, giving us back a sense of what we scroll past: time. Yet her work also embraces its aesthetic, each painterly swatch a paean to high saturation and luminous intensity. Meticulously constructed from layer upon layer…
Ruth Calland, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. For this month’s interview CBP member Ruth Calland talks about her solo exhibition, ‘This Is All The Treasure We Can Have and Hold’. The exhibition explores notions of transforming and non-binary beings within evocative paintings of figures merging with landscapes. They include ranging references from early 20th…
The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize 2024 Catalogue Published in August 2025, the catalogue for The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize 2024 features the shortlisted artists Ruth Bateman, Alison Critchlow, Davina Jackson, and Polly Townsend, and the winning artists Harriet Mena Hill and Sophia Rosenthal. The introduction is by Dr Narbi Price, Chair of Contemporary British Painting,…
Phil Illingworth selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. This month’s interview discusses Phil Illingworth’s solo exhibition Juggernaut: ‘Bringing together works spanning more than fifteen years alongside new, never-before-seen work, Juggernaut presents a potent and timely exhibition by Phil Illingworth. Featuring drawing, drawing and painting in the expanded field, sculpture, and film, this body of work…
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Artist of the Month June 2025: Lisa Ivory, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. Lisa Ivory’s landscapes are commonly occupied by a Wildman, who occasionally interacts with a female human figure. There is a Rake’s Progress of sorts, with a skeletal Death figure interrupting the discourse between these characters. The Beast attempts sympathetic magic by scrawling…
Artist of the Month April 2025: Geraint Evans, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. Geraint Evans is interested in the ways in which we perceive, encounter and experience the natural world and read it as landscape. His figurative paintings and drawings explore the notion that landscape is largely a social and cultural construct, responding to the…
Neverends: Judith Tucker’s Fitties – exhibition and talk event transcriptions Neverends: Judith Tucker’s Fitties In June-July 2024 the library in Cleethorpes hosted an exhibition of a small selection of Judith Tucker’s Fitties paintings. During the exhibition some of Judith’s friends and colleagues came together to talk about Judith and her work.
The Contemporary British Painting Prize goes biennial! The Contemporary British Painting Prize has grown beyond recognition over the years. We started with 300 submissions in 2016, and in 2024 we had an unbelievable 1200+ entries. The first exhibition was just 12 paintings in a small town hall gallery in London, the last exhibition of 51…
Artist of the Month March 2025: Barbara Howey, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. “My current body of work is paintings based on plants. Part of my process is photographing the species of plants seen on my daily walks, not rare but local, some native and some finding a space to grow where seeds have blown…
APT GalleryHarold Wharf, 6 Creekside, Deptford, London SE8 4SA27 March – 13 April, Thurs – Sun, noon-5pm, Free Entry An exhibition of painting, installation, film and performance that takes the simple idea of light emanating from darkness as a starting point to explore deeper themes of the unseen, the psyche, memory, otherness, loss, love, and…
by Louisa Buck This essay about the work of Daniel H Bell, winner of the CBP Prize 2024, was published in the CBP Prize 2024 exhibition catalogue. The essay forms part of the prize. ‘Every normal human being (and not merely the ‘artist’) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely…
Artist of the Month February 2025: Roland Hicks, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. Roland Hicks makes paradoxical paintings and objects that look like minimal abstract assemblages – apparently slightly crudely stapled together from offcuts of various types of chipboard. Sometimes these pieces also create a simple illusion of a three dimensional geometric solid, or of…
Artist of the Month December 2024: Marguerite Horner, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. “Marguerite’s paintings lift the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the specific into the universal…they are about the seen and the unseen, the life behind the eye as well as the world in front of it” – Lady Marina Vaizey CBE, formerly the…
An essay by Beth Hughes (independent Curator and Researcher) about the work of Rich Jellyman the winner of the CBP Prize 2023. This essay was published in the CBP Prize 2023 exhibition catalogue. The essay forms part of the prize. ‘Human creativity is a process of variation and recombination’ Susan J. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1)…
Artist of the Month November 2024: Rich Jellyman, selected and interviewed by Paul Newman for CBP. Rich Jellyman makes paintings that reference internet culture and incorporate technology in the selection of subject matter. Utilising images that display a certain kind of internet sensibility – disposable phone photos, surreal mashups taken from Reddit threads, bad photoshop, memes, AI and…