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03:43Today, our pods are looking out over the rooftops of Keswick
03:47and the bare slopes of Skiddar, rising 931 metres above them.
03:53A row of trees runs along the foreground beneath a cloudless sky promising a hot day ahead.
04:03The view today is stunning. There's a few challenges.
04:06There's not a lot of foreground to be working with, so it looks quite flat.
04:09So really just trying to bring everything out of it, so there's a bit of depth.
04:13I think the mountain is fabulous.
04:17Slightly concerned about the buildings fronted by trees,
04:21but we'll jump that fence when we come to it.
04:35What speaks to me here today is the contrast of the colours,
04:41the strong shadows there. Those are the elements I'm looking for today.
04:47Inspired by the American realist movement, art teacher Chris Wright uses strong shadows
04:53to bring a surreal edge to his paintings,
04:55as shown in his unsettling scene of an empty caravan park in Porthcall, Wales.
05:01Chris, in your submission, which I really, really love, that sort of loneliness of the caravan,
05:09I mean, did you... It feels slightly dystopian.
05:12It does, yeah.
05:12Whereas today, the underpainting that I can see, I can't see you going down that route.
05:18No, this will be slightly sort of different, sort of genre.
05:22I'm going to try and find a composition that has maybe some of the sort of architectural elements,
05:27and then towards the foreground there's some strong shadows and shapes of the trees,
05:30so patterns, textures.
05:33I have to tell you, the light becomes quite dramatic later on in the day.
05:36Will you leave the fells until later on in the day in order to catch that,
05:41or will you go with what you see?
05:43I think I'll go from early morning, because there's quite dramatic shadows casting over there.
05:59Colour is everything. It's all around us, if we choose to see it.
06:05I just love working out the relationships between the colours, complementary colours,
06:11do something really important in my painting.
06:15Cathy Pearce is a professional landscape artist who uses contrasting colours in her vibrant pastel pieces.
06:23She secured her place in the competition with an expressive depiction of a larch tree on an autumn day at sunrise.
06:30Cathy, tell me a little bit about what you've done so far.
06:37OK, so I haven't done much more than the drawing-in stage at the moment.
06:42The sky is more or less as I want it,
06:46so I will gradually add layers of colour until I'm happy with the different tones and the distance and temperatures.
06:54In your submission, one of the striking things is the intensity, the burst of colours.
07:02The burst of colour.
07:03I've been specialising in pastels for about 13 years now, because I love the immediacy.
07:09There's more pigment included in a pastel than there is in any tube of paint,
07:14so that's why I love pastels, because they're intense.
07:18The combinations there that you've gone for, and this sort of golden-yellow hues and the highlights there feel already really strong,
07:26so it looks good already.
07:37So, yeah, I ran up there yesterday.
07:41Look, you're insane.
07:43I'm in pain.
07:45It's kind of interesting from here.
07:47It's quite brutal, that landscape.
07:49Yeah.
07:50And so it's kind of interesting to be in this beautiful landscape
07:52and find something for our artists with a bit of brawn.
07:57It's overwhelming, it's very high, and there's nothing there.
08:01No.
08:02Does that make it very difficult to paint?
08:04Yes, especially because we've got a one-dimensional sky as well today.
08:07You've got to make decisions about sort of horizon lines.
08:12How do you create that height or the distance?
08:15It's by putting something in front.
08:18There's plenty of stuff to work with.
08:20Of course, it's a mountain.
08:21The winner of this series gets a commission to paint Crowpatrick in Ireland.
08:26Yes.
08:26A mountain I know well.
08:28This is a second cousin.
08:30I mean, it's not dissimilar in looks.
08:32Equally barren in Ireland?
08:33Yeah.
08:34Have you run up it as well in Ireland?
08:35I've walked up it.
08:37I like to paint, to convey how I feel about a particular landscape.
08:50Like these hills that we're looking at.
08:53There's something slightly overpowering about them, isn't there?
08:58Alison Patterson-Marz's expressionistic works are characterised by their colour and drama.
09:04In her submission, she used a restricted palette to bring out dramatic shapes in a winter hedgerow, set against the background of a frosty field.
09:14The thing that we felt was really interesting about your submission is the sinuous lines that were sort of bringing the entire painting together.
09:24It feels today like the gestures feel really different and much more expressive.
09:29I like to feel the shape of a thing and that comes out in the gesture, but I still need to work out the shapes and the forms of these hills in front of me.
09:40I'm looking for the drama.
09:41It's about the volume and the shape and the life, really, of the hills.
09:45I've gone with what's there because I think the composition is already laid out in front of me.
10:02I want to spend as much time as I can on getting these buildings or an impression of these buildings.
10:07Self-taught artist Ian Dowding found his way to painting through an interest in photography.
10:14His submission in acrylics is a carefully composed depiction of an overlooked garden shed and took four days to complete.
10:23Ian.
10:24Yes.
10:25We've decided to really test you.
10:29Right.
10:30And we looked at your submission and we thought we were going to give you a big expanse of nothing to paint.
10:34How's it going?
10:35I want the mountains to make a nice frame for those buildings.
10:39I want the contrast of having those little flecks of white in amongst here to echo those and for the mountains to be a backdrop more than anything.
10:49We'd love your submission because it's quite an interesting, it's quite difficult to read. Abstract, isn't it?
10:55Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's much more interesting to paint something that is actually not perfect.
11:00Well, sorry, this is a bit perfect then for you.
11:02I'd like a challenge.
11:06Capturing Skiddar on canvas may be a challenge, but there are another 50 artists arriving in Keswick today prepared to take it on.
11:14Yes, it's the landscape artist wildcards. And as always, some of them seem to be making it up as they go along.
11:24Today's view is stunning. I'm a bit worried because I didn't bring much green with me, so I'm going to have to use my other colours very creatively here.
11:32I think you might get some red hills, yeah.
11:35So today I've brought my acrylics, which is what I primarily paint in, but I've also brought some cheeky oils as well,
11:43because I'm quite a fast painter. So, you know, if time permits, maybe do a quick oil.
11:49They're competing for just one wildcard place at this year's semi-final, and for some, it's a family affair.
11:58Stephanie. Hello. Michelle. Hello. And you are related?
12:02Yes. Mother and daughter. Mother? Mother. Right, okay. Mother and daughter.
12:07Are you painting the same view? Not quite. I like portrait, and she likes landscape.
12:12Oh, okay. You really do have all the same gear. Yeah, yeah.
12:15Is this all new for today? Yeah, that was my husband.
12:18Oh, was it? Where is he? Working. Well, he needs to, to buy all this equipment. Yeah, absolutely.
12:24While the wildcards adjust to their new tools, the pod artists are grappling with something far more urgent, the steady tick of the clock.
12:34I've got the buildings in, I've got the sky, the background hills coming up to the foreground trees, but I've got a lot to do.
12:43I've blocked in the underpainting, and I'm just starting to add the colour now in sort of blocks, trying to build that sort of tonal variation.
12:58I'm just realising that coming towards the end of the first hour, I don't think I've done quite sufficient as I would have wanted to.
13:04So I shall be charging ahead.
13:06At the foot of Skidder Mountain, it's an hour into the competition, and one artist is taking a bit of a gamble.
13:32So I am a lino cut printmaker. What I love about it is you never really know what you're going to get. It's a really exciting process.
13:43Amelia Hemmings creates expressive lino prints using several layers of colour.
13:49Her submission is the view from inside of Bothy, on the island of Pabay in Scotland, a place she has visited since she was a child.
13:57Amelia, I love this office. It's very, very organised. Talk me through what you did.
14:06The whole image comes from one piece of lino. So you start with the lightest colour of ink on first.
14:13And you put the paper on, roll it through the press, take it off.
14:19And then I would carve that light layer away, and then put the next colour on, which is a shade darker, and so on.
14:27Your submission, one of the reasons why we liked it, is for a lino cut, it's actually quite sparse.
14:32How many layers do you think you'll have?
14:34Well, I don't want to do more than six in the time.
14:38That's a lot, isn't it? Yeah.
14:40That's the plan. It might not go like that.
14:49I'd say I'm an impressionist painter, and I love to create the story of the setting and the light, the energy of that space.
14:59Stephanie Euphemia is a former tennis player who recently gave up a corporate career to pursue her passion for art.
15:10Her atmospheric paintings convey a strong sense of narrative, as shown in her submission of a dusty tennis court in Morocco.
15:21Stephanie, tell me about the landscape and why you picked this little slice.
15:27I picked this little slice because I got this one little house, but there was some smoke coming from behind it, and it just created this amazing atmosphere.
15:36Your submission, it's a very odd choice of subject matter, but it's very poignant.
15:42I felt like all of those subjects didn't feel right together.
15:46The tennis court next to this French military fort, and then the background mountains, and I think that's what makes it so interesting.
15:52And yet they all work so well together harmoniously.
15:55You tell this one very strange story. Yeah.
15:57It's kind of interesting.
15:59Now you talked about your submission with a slight surreal twist.
16:02A smoking building on a sunny day, I see that would make a surreal story, yeah.
16:06The peak of Skiddar is one of the highest in the Lake District. Today the mountainside is bare, but these slopes were once part of a very different landscape.
16:18Skiddar Mountain used to have trees on it. The forest that would have been here would have been temperate rainforest, a particular type of habitat that we get in places like the Lake District, in places like Dartmoor, in Wales.
16:30Now a new project is underway to reinstate this precious ecosystem, lost through deforestation in the early Middle Ages.
16:41Cumbria Wildlife Trust purchased 3,000 acres of upland all the way up to the summit of Skiddar, which makes it the highest nature reserve in England.
16:50We are going to be collecting seed from as nearby as we can get it. That ensures that the trees that we're going to be growing are going to be suited for these kind of conditions.
17:00The trust is also restoring Skiddar's ancient peatland, drained over centuries to make the land more suitable for farming.
17:07These peatlands are thousands of years old. They're bringing in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow. Where drains have been cut in the peats, we dig buns into those drains and that keeps it functioning properly.
17:24While the most tangible results of the project are still years away, this work is a significant step to re-establishing one of the world's rarest habitats.
17:33The peat work that we're going to be doing on here, we're hoping to get some of the vast majority of the work done within the next year.
17:41The tree work is going to be much slower and so we're looking at this being a hundred year project to get those trees established on site.
17:54Back in the pods, the pressure is on, with every artist tackling today's challenge in their own distinctive way.
18:00I like working in pencil because it's a bit more controlled. I've gone through a composition just down the hill. I've taped off a small area, given I've only got four hours. I felt that was the most sensible way to do it.
18:13Dan West is drawn to scenes with atmospheric lighting, rendered in graphite pencil. His small scale submission, showing two women in a cafe, was captured in Portsmouth, where he attended university.
18:27One thing that was striking about your submission is the scale. It's a really tiny, very detailed piece and it feels really intimate looking at it. And then today we've presented you with an immense landscape.
18:41An immense landscape. Yeah. And then you're still working on a tiny scale.
18:46Because I've got very kind of detailed pieces, I don't have to think about going large. It would just take me too long.
18:52There's an area along the bottom that I'm going to show the ground and it's going to be lighter, so it will hopefully give that sense of scale.
18:58I drew it all out first in like a 2B pencil and I'm just slowly trying to work in from the back, but the houses are doing my head in really, at the minute, so I'm parking that.
19:06There's already an extraordinary amount of detail in what you've done.
19:09Yeah, it's getting there. I feel like I need to take a little bit of a step back from it, take a deep breath, go back to it and crack on.
19:16The way I paint is a technique called impasto. It means thickly applied paint. At the minute there's just a lot of observation, there's a lot of paint that's just being moved around and it's going to be a constant exploration.
19:40Courier Scott Simpson takes his inspiration from long walks around the countryside near his home in Aberdeenshire.
19:50His submission, depicting an old sluice gate, was painted in his signature impasto style using a palette of muddy browns.
19:59Scott, you've got these fantastic piles of poo here. I mean, they are spectacular in colour. Very earthy. I'm interested, because this is quite dear to my heart, the stuff of paint isn't talked about enough.
20:13It's always seen as a pigment or values and tones and, you know, this kind of stuff.
20:17I mean, you said poo, but I mean mud, you know, and it's got that element of play with it. It's quite essential to the way you explore the world when you have to play with materials.
20:27Sounds exciting way to work. Yeah. Let's talk about your submission. Again, there's a lot of paint. I love it because it's sort of relentless.
20:36I'm fascinated by this. Enjoy play and I'm looking forward to see what happens. Thank you.
20:42Meanwhile, the wild cards are also enjoying a bit of play time.
20:50I have brought watercolour and pen. So I do the watercolour first and then I go over it in really fine detail with the pen.
20:58I like to mix the fine art aspect of watercolour with something just a little bit different, a little bit funky.
21:05Lemia. Hello. I mean, we'll get to your painting in a minute, but look how stylish you are.
21:22Oh, thank you. Do you always paint in this sort of get up?
21:24Sometimes. Yeah. And the white gloves, are they just to keep your hands clean or?
21:28Yes, because I'm extremely messy. Right.
21:31It comes with my ADHD, so if I don't have my gloves, it will be all over my hands.
21:42What do you think you need to do?
21:44I quite like the mountains and the sky. Maybe a bit more judging.
21:48Judging? Judging.
21:49OK, a bit more judging needs to be done.
21:51A bit more judging needs to be done.
21:53The finer details are also the focus for our pod artists, as they face the end of their second hour and a rising temperature.
22:07Feeling all right. I'm feeling hot. Slightly sunburned.
22:11Would you like mummy to put some on for you?
22:14I feel I've got a healthy bit of stress going on, but it's all right. It's good. It's fine. But, yeah, I'm feeling it a little bit.
22:29At this stage, things are in the balance, and I'm hoping that once I've got the basic colours down, I can get in the detail.
22:38I'm panicking all the time. Sorry.
22:41Yeah.
22:56In the heart of the Lake District, eight artists are halfway through their day painting Skidder Mountain and the town of Keswick.
23:03I started working from the back into the front, did the mountains, did the back layer of the trees, got to the buildings, wasn't enjoying that process.
23:15I've left that beat, and I've kind of continued working forward, and I'm now revisiting the buildings in the mid-ground.
23:21I've put the house in quite a few times, and it hasn't quite worked. I haven't got the values quite right.
23:38I'm leaving it to last when I know that I've got all the time to just focus on the house.
23:42I hate to be negative, but it's not worked out as well as I expected.
23:57Right. At what point did you start to feel it was going off east?
24:01As soon as I started to try and put in the building.
24:05Are there bits of it that you're happy with?
24:07I quite like the mountain.
24:09I was just thinking that. It's fabulous, actually.
24:11That's very nice.
24:13So the last time I was in Cumbria was for a screening of a movie in which I played Cumbrian icon Postman Pat.
24:26And the weather was not like this.
24:30No.
24:31Where are we?
24:32It's like being in the south of France.
24:34Yeah.
24:35It's just the light is very sheer. I can barely see you. It's so intense.
24:39So is that affecting our painters, do we think?
24:41I think it's making some of them sort of take liberties with their colors.
24:45I mean, there's some psychedelic activity going on out there today.
24:49And then there's also some muddy stuff as well.
24:52Amelia's on her fourth color.
24:54She says she's behind, but she hopes to get back on track.
24:58Well, Amelia has a plan, doesn't she?
24:59She wants to get six colors in by the end of the day.
25:02She should be okay as long as she's not getting overly distracted.
25:06She's working with a really challenging medium, which is not really made for en plein air painting.
25:13But there's also a lot that she can do.
25:15You know, she can play with inkiness.
25:17She can play with weight.
25:18She can play with layering.
25:20So I'm curious to see what she comes up with.
25:23I'm worried Dan's going to run out of space.
25:25There's so much going down into that small area.
25:29He's going to run out of white soon.
25:31Oh, no, I think he's left that lovely little slice of diagonal white space at the bottom
25:37that's given a real tension to it.
25:39I really like that little gap that he's left there.
25:41I do think he's running out of space.
25:44And not space as in terms of composition.
25:46But when you're drawing, it's what you put down, but also what you leave.
25:51It's the way the paper works within the marks.
25:54And the more you work it, of course, there is a danger of then you close that texture.
25:59So he's produced the drawing now.
26:01I don't know what he can add to it, to be honest.
26:04Stephanie's putting a house in, in the middle left of her painting,
26:08and she feels this will make or break the work.
26:10Wow.
26:11She's tried several times, rubbed it out several times.
26:14Wow.
26:15Yes, Stephanie works within a traditional sort of art historical context,
26:19and she's done very well.
26:21I mean, earlier today, she saw that smoke rising from that house,
26:23and it sort of set off a narrative.
26:25It's a difficult one to get just right.
26:27It really worries me, the idea of a house.
26:28I had no idea.
26:29Because one of the things I find with Stephanie's work at the moment
26:32is I fall into the valleys of what she's painted.
26:36So I would worry if she was going to introduce some other element
26:38that would distract my eye.
26:40Ian's given us a lot of the green stuff and the promise of houses.
26:44He's like a developer who's told us he's going to build an estate.
26:48Well, it's curious with Ian, isn't it?
26:50Because Ian is one of the few that has gone wide,
26:53and as a result, it just does feel like you're looking at just a mass of green at the moment.
26:57It's very blocky.
26:59It hasn't got the finesse yet that one would need to see by the end of the day.
27:03It feels really unresolved at the moment,
27:05so I'm a little bit worried about how it's going to look.
27:08He's got work to do.
27:10Cathy feels slightly panicked.
27:12Has she reason to be?
27:14I don't think Cathy needs to worry.
27:16Pastels are quite a fast medium.
27:18She's still got some beautiful passages in the distant hills.
27:21She knows how to manipulate the colours with pastel.
27:24I think the whole thing is there to be one.
27:27Scott's been busy with that brown paint, hasn't he?
27:29Slathering it on.
27:31I mean, I don't know if he's sponsored by brown paint.
27:35You know, Scott marches to the beat of his own drum,
27:38and I know it sounds perverse,
27:40but I really like the cream sky he's given us.
27:43You know, it's just lovely and smooth.
27:44It's a wonderful contrast.
27:46That's a bit I hate.
27:47The cream sky.
27:48What are you doing?
27:49I don't know what the man is doing, but I love it.
27:52I get that sense of him just trying stuff out and mark-making,
27:55and I'm fascinated by his language.
27:58He's just mad genius, really.
28:04Chris seems very chilled.
28:05Says he's right where he wants to be.
28:07All's good with the world.
28:09I think the thing that he's approaching really well
28:11is that this is a landscape that has many layers, actually.
28:14There are several foregrounds.
28:15There's vegetation first, and then there's houses,
28:17and then there's the mountains,
28:19and I think he's really attacking those various layers.
28:21I think he's doing really well.
28:23I worry that Chris hasn't progressed enough at this stage of the day,
28:27and the work holds so much promise,
28:29but I think he's, like, up against time.
28:31Alison says she's at the point where normally
28:33she'd put the painting in the garage for three weeks,
28:35come back to it, reassess, start again.
28:37What's she seeing or not seeing that she might notice
28:40at a later date that you can see?
28:42I like the way Alison set up the painting,
28:44squeezing Skidder right to the top.
28:47There's great dynamism.
28:48The colours she's using as underpainting are powerful.
28:51The challenge when you're working with such dense colours
28:54and such a bold language of colours is it still needs to read
29:00and it still needs to sing together,
29:04and right now this is the thing that worries me
29:06a little bit about Alison's painting.
29:08So it's the pine trees that I'm working on now.
29:23My painting was looking really bare
29:25without much of the foreground trees in,
29:27so I've just started making some bold marks
29:30to get some colour for the trees down.
29:33I do feel I'm on track at the moment.
29:38There's nothing dramatic happening in the painting,
29:40it's just a sense of as the sun moves round,
29:43it's changing and trying to remember
29:45how it maybe looked when I started the painting this morning.
29:50I put the prints up to dry
29:52so I can visually see what's going on.
29:54I've done the blue sky, some clouds and greens,
29:59and then I'm going to have a little bit of purple in there,
30:01which I'm very excited about.
30:08Hi there, Steven.
30:09I mean, the first thing I've got to say
30:12is that the sky is not blue.
30:14The blue sky is so traditional.
30:16Right, it's so sky.
30:18It's so sky.
30:19Yeah.
30:20There is going to be an element of colour.
30:22I've seen quite a few paragliders going around.
30:24OK.
30:25So I'm waiting for the right moment
30:27to put just a little splash of colour,
30:29just draw the eye.
30:32I'm convinced that Joan Bakewell is going to be one of them.
30:34Oh, yeah, and just drop them.
30:35Yeah.
30:36I wouldn't put it past her.
30:37Yeah, yeah.
30:38Just land on the wall.
30:39Wouldn't that be great?
30:40Yeah, it would be.
30:41Yeah.
30:42Yeah.
30:43Yeah.
30:44Yeah.
30:45Yeah.
30:46Yeah.
30:47Yeah.
30:48Yeah.
30:49Yeah.
30:50Yeah.
30:51Yeah.
30:52Along from the pods,
30:53the wildcard artists are putting the finishing touches
30:55to their artworks.
30:56I think I'm almost there.
31:10I just need to add some detailing into the foreground.
31:13It's mainly highlights now of our foreground trees.
31:16It's now time for the judges to decide on today's winner.
31:28Are you actually joking?
31:29Are you actually joking?
31:30Are you?
31:31Well done.
31:32Well done.
31:34We were really taken with the painting.
31:35It's really beautiful.
31:36Thank you so much.
31:37It's really atmospheric and there's a lot of texture.
31:39You've done a great job with the colours.
31:40It's really good.
31:41Oh, thank you.
31:42Oh, my God.
31:45I'm so stunned and I'm so happy.
31:50I'm really happy.
31:55Lemia Elgin from Oxfordshire will enter a pool of wildcard winners from all the heats,
32:05just one of whom will be chosen to compete in the semi-final.
32:20The purple's on.
32:21Yes.
32:22This means I'm nearly done.
32:23That's colour number seven, which, yeah, that's a lot, but it's all right.
32:28Yep.
32:29I'm happy with that so far.
32:35The time constraints are preying on me slightly.
32:42Because I'm doing it in quite a loose way, that's okay.
32:45I'll just go with what time I have and work with that.
32:53The one thing that could ruin it at this stage would be if I put too much pastel on,
32:59I've got to be really careful now and be selective about what I do next.
33:04In the Lake District, eight artists are nearing the end of their day capturing the slopes of Skidda.
33:26And, of course, no visit to Keswick would be complete without a taste of its famous plum bread.
33:33Oh, wow.
33:34Keswick plum bread.
33:35Yes.
33:36Lovely.
33:37But not all artists have time to sample my offerings.
33:48I'm just putting the finishing touches to my painting, and I think if I'm going to do any more to it, I might just make it go the wrong way.
33:58I have just been finishing off the house, which I've left till last, because it was the biggest challenge, but I feel like it's done.
34:13One minute left.
34:14One minute.
34:15One minute.
34:20Sorry.
34:21I need a beer.
34:25I need a beer.
34:36Artists, your time is up.
34:38Please stop what you're doing and step away from your artwork.
34:41Just one of these eight artists can win today's heat and be in the running for the title of Landscape Artist of the Year.
35:00The winning artist will travel to the west coast of County Mayo to paint Ireland's famous mountain, Crowpatrick.
35:09As a constant presence in the landscape, the ever-changing light and mood of the mountain have inspired artists and writers for centuries.
35:17And it will be up to our winner to convey the mystery, as well as the majesty, of this beloved landmark for the National Gallery of Ireland.
35:30For now, in Keswick, it's time for the judges to review the eight finished works.
35:36Before they decide who advances to this year's semi-final, they must narrow them down to a short list of three.
35:47Do you think it was a bit overwhelming, this view today?
35:50When I saw the view today, I saw Skidda in all its glory.
35:54I didn't see the town, really.
35:56And I think they were forced to do that because there's nothing on that mountain, really.
36:01I feel that many of the artists today picked up on color, either in a realistic way or an imagined way.
36:08Emilias, I think, you fall into that deep, almost purple color in the valleys,
36:15which is, for me, what resonates in this landscape all the time.
36:18And I think Emilias done that really well.
36:22Yeah, I love Emilias treatment of the mountain.
36:25I don't understand the language in the foreground in relationship to the mountain.
36:32I think Dan's been more successful in conveying our relationship to the mountain than Emilias.
36:39Yeah.
36:40He's put pencil down on paper in so many different ways that he conveys this immense distance.
36:45It's a marvel, really, that size.
36:47It's almost like you want to look at it with a magnifying glass.
36:50The density and the detail is incredible, and I think he's really done a great job working with highlights and gradation.
36:58Stephanie, I mean, just by choosing the right tone and color, you can put miles into a paint.
37:06I don't know how that works. That's the magic of paint.
37:09What I think Stephanie has done is that, you know, if you observe the distance,
37:14the distance is often slightly purple.
37:16She's represented that beautifully in that sort of smoky, hazy way.
37:21I think Ian knew he had made a mistake in putting the houses in.
37:24And I think because the paint was drying so quickly, he really struggled to adjust it.
37:29I think there are really good moments in the mountains.
37:32I think he did very, very well with that.
37:33You get the sense of the mountain behind us looming over us, and then I think that mountain is, it works very well.
37:38Yeah, yeah.
37:39Out of all of them, I think Kathy got a real sense of the heat of the day.
37:42I feel hot looking at it.
37:43I think there's some really successful moments in the work.
37:46I really love the highlights, and there's some gorgeous moments in the houses as well.
37:50The foreground I find a little bit difficult to read.
37:53Scott, what a fabulous user of paint.
37:58I think he's an abstract painter.
38:00I think you can see in the paint buildings drawn in, but you don't know that they're buildings.
38:05It's just his reaction to them.
38:06I enjoyed the generosity in how he's working with paint there.
38:10I think there's something really, really powerful in that way of approaching the landscape.
38:15Having said that, I think there are also some moments in this painting that still needed to be resolved in order to feel as confident and intentional as we'd like this mark to feel throughout the work.
38:27I love Chris's use of shadow.
38:29You understand that the light's coming from the left towards the right.
38:32I think it's full of promise.
38:34The thing that I think he's done very well, which many other artists have struggled with, is to articulate that sense of depth.
38:40Alison's work is just full of vigor, isn't it?
38:43Yeah.
38:44But I feel cold.
38:45It's the blue, which slightly confuses me.
38:48But she's definitely got the drama, she's definitely got the energy, and definitely got the menace.
38:57Artists, thank you so much for a terrific day.
39:02You've all worked very hard.
39:03But the judges have now selected a shortlist of three artists.
39:08The first artist is...
39:12Dan West.
39:20The second artist on the shortlist is...
39:25Stephanie Euphemia.
39:27And the third artist is...
39:34Chris Wright.
39:47Well done.
39:48Good shot face.
39:50To be shortlisted just means everything.
39:54It is beyond what I was expecting.
39:56It's such a confidence piece.
39:57I think you spend so much time in the studio on your own that you don't really have much feedback on your work.
40:02So it's really nice to have had that, yeah, that reassurance.
40:05Hello, Chris.
40:06Nice one.
40:07Well done.
40:13Only one artist will go through to the semi-final.
40:15The judge's choice is based not just on today's performance, but also on the artist's submissions.
40:21So a day painting a brooding mountain.
40:29Dan clearly works fairly small.
40:31I'm casting my mind forward to the National Gallery of Ireland, who have decided that Crowe Patrick has never been captured, and that's a glaring emission in their collection.
40:40They commission a painting, we're all gathered around, there's a big curtain, it gets dropped, and there's a three by four inch, tiny black and white mountain.
40:51Is that a problem?
40:52There is a long tradition of very powerful works being made on a very small scale.
40:58And one of the things that I recognize in Dan's work is an incredible intensity.
41:04And that's not just the intensity of the mark making, but there's an intensity that draws you in, and that's partly to do with the scale.
41:11And we can put it in a really big mount with a gold frame, it'll be fine.
41:14When I'm looking at Dan's work and his submission, the submission for me, it's more the language of film.
41:21There's something there that feels very cinematographic.
41:24It's two completely different ways to sort of translate something about the world around us.
41:29And it's something that he's able to do with so little.
41:32And all of it is about, you know, how much pressure he applies, and that's quite extraordinary.
41:37Interesting though, with Stephanie, you've got that same, I hadn't realized the foreground, you've got that same thrust from right to left.
41:43Actually, I didn't realize it was a device that she's used more than once. Clever.
41:49It's very quiet. I really like the way she conjures it.
41:53I mean, today's mountain was just glorious harmonies in grey that gave us a smoky, shimmering distance.
42:00And I suppose that the Morocco painting is about the color of the little tower and the deserted tennis court.
42:07So very gentle, very quiet, but full of atmosphere.
42:10Chris, like all our artists in the shortlist, not particularly interested in today's sky.
42:16Judging by Chris's submission, he, I mean, he can paint an atmospheric sky with weather in it.
42:21So I suspect his decision today was to give us the height of the mountain, which is pretty impressive.
42:27Chris's paintings are incredibly English.
42:29It's about the English on holiday. It's got a fantastic flavor.
42:34I think both paintings are about solitude. I could really feel that in the sort of forlorn and eerie caravans.
42:43And then similarly, I think today those houses feel quite lonely in that huge landscape.
42:48But funny enough, both places have multiple dwellings. So although it is about loneliness, it's loneliness in a grouping with other loneliness.
42:58It's lonely. Alone in a crowd. Yes.
43:00We need to give Chris a hug.
43:06Dan, Stephanie and Chris, you should all be very proud of yourselves for getting through to the shortlist.
43:11But only one of you can be today's heat winner.
43:15And the artist going through to the semi-final is...
43:26Dan West.
43:34A little bit lost words at the minute. There's a lot to take in. There's a lot to take in.
43:39It was quite surreal to win, really.
43:41It's definitely a confidence boost to be the winner.
43:43Getting your work validated by people who work in the industry is huge for me, so...
43:49Dan's just a brilliant young artist who's able to produce in graphite, pencil and paper, on a very small scale, immensely complex drawings, which say a lot about drawing itself, but also a lot about the world we live in and how we interact with it.
44:06And I'm just astonished that he can do it on such a small scale, with such huge distances created. I think it's magical.
44:19If you'd like to find out more about taking part in the programme or the work of the featured artists, visit our website, skyartsartistoftheyear.tv
44:28Next time, it's all aboard the Good Ship landscape.
44:35I don't know how steady my hand is going to be, or my stomach, to be honest with you.
44:41As eight new artists try to fathom the view of London's South Bank.
44:46This is going to be the biggest on-planet challenge I ever did.
44:50So, as they fight to keep their heads above water...
44:54Yeah, I'm just really struggling right now.
44:57...who will be swept away?
44:59I try not to think what's in that water, cos...
45:01You see a few things floating by.
45:02Yeah, I...
45:03I love that.
45:04HAPPY
45:05MUSIC
45:33Transcription by CastingWords
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