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I was utterly blown away by this today.  I was on my own but kept talking out loud with gasps of admiration.  And it’s free.  If you do not attend you are making a very big mistake with your life.

Huge, HUGE thanks to BP for sponsoring this for 20 years unbroken.

This was the overall winner.  Of course a crunched internet image can do no justice to the magical quality of the picture by Peter Monkman of his 12 year old daughter.  You’ll need to go see it in the flesh.

This is the description the National gallery uses…

Monkman was shortlisted for the first time this year, having been included in the BP Portrait Award exhibition in 1999, 2001 and 2003. Currently Director of Art at Charterhouse School, Surrey, Monkman, 44, studied visual arts at the University of Lancaster, John Moores University Liverpool and the University of London. The shortlisted portrait is part of a series of portraits of his daughter exploring the concept of the changeling, a child substituted for another by stealth, often with an elf. ‘I challenge the fixed notion of an idealised image of childhood and substitute it for a more unsettling, complex, representation that exists in its own right as a painting.’ The initial ideas for this portrait came from photographic studies of Anna playing in woods in Brittany where the light had a magical quality.

Other winners included this stunning photo-realistic painting of his son , Tom, by Michael Gaskell.

And another in the same vein, called Benfica Blue, won best young artist for Mark Jameson.  The detail on the girl’s face.  In the flesh is quite remarkable.

I loved this by Mary Jane Ansell, called Georgie but it failed to win a prize;

But, for me, the best in show went to On Assi Ghat by Edward Sutcliffe.  Yes.  It is a painting.