We chat to the Bristol artist who stormed the 2024 Friends’ Exhibition by coming first and second in the Cass Art People’s Choice award vote…
The 2024 Friends’ Exhibition was a huge sucess, with a very high standard of entry, great visitor numbers and strong sales. Submissions raised £5268 for the RWA, with 423 artworks handed in by 156 artists. Of those 198 works by 116 artists were selected. 42 works were sold at a total of £8233 – adding a further £2881.60 to the RWA coffers.
However, there was one clear winner for the Cass Art People’s Choice award, voted for by visitors to the show: Jenny Urquhart‘s wonderful snail paintings. Jenny claimed top spot for The Rivals, narrowly beating her own The 7 Deadly Sins.
Jenny wins a Cass Art voucher plus the chance to exhibit in their Park Street store. Here’s our Q&A…
Congratulations on winning the Cass Art People’s Choice award… Your paintings came first and a close second, well ahead of third place! Obvious question – why snails?
Thank you! I was so chuffed to be selected for the Friends exhibition, and then having heard that other people have enjoyed my paintings has made my year.
Why snails? I have always loved creepy crawlies and kept loads of them as pets in jam jars as a child. I’m sure if Playstations had existed in the 80s that really would not have happened! My dissertation for my Biology degree focused on invertebrates and I spent months looking down microscopes identifying and drawing thousands of small creatures collected from Africa, as part of a large study by Oxford University. I found that if you look at invertebrates really close-up they can look either utterly terrifying or very, very beautiful. To me, snails fall in the latter category and so I decided that my paintings should celebrate some of these less popular little creatures we have in our gardens.
In both the snail pictures, I challenged myself to portray them showing different emotions, even though they have no obvious facial features, apart from comical eyes on stalks.
Can you tell us a little something about The Rivals – how you approached creating it, where the idea came from etc…And did you use real snails as models?
The idea for The Rivals formed during lockdown, when I finally caught covid and was stuck at home feeling ill and bored. I sent my son out to a supermarket, asking him to buy healthy things and he came home armed with masses of fruit. I saw snails just outside our back door and I left them a few pieces of the leftover fruit. Within half an hour it was covered in snails gorging themselves and it looked like they were very slowly competing for the biggest and best pieces. So yes, I did use real snails as models although I did cheat a bit and one of the snails appears several times in the paintings.
With regards to the composition of the picture, I wanted to try and create a slightly silly, nearly-still life in a dark setting, a bit like an old Dutch painting, where the viewer can’t decide whether the approaching snails are after the clearly favoured strawberry, or they are love rivals for the snail perched on top. The slime trails across the frame was just a bit of fun.
When did you first realise you were an artist?
I always loved drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil and I remember being asked at school aged 6 what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said artist and scientist. Shortly after that I remember winning a massive chocolate Curly Wurly for a drawing competition, so I must have thought drawing was a very good thing to carry on doing!! I’m sure Curly Wurlys were much bigger in the 80s?
You used to work as a biology teacher and now your vibrant artworks are everywhere in Bristol! Have you been surprised about how your artistic career has taken off. And what do you most enjoy about it?
I have been really surprised at how my career has gone and absolutely LOVE what I now do. I did really enjoy teaching, but found it hard to juggle the job with having a young family. I randomly painted a picture one day and a friend asked to buy it, and so I did a few more pictures …and so it went on. With no formal training, I hadn’t really painted anything until my mid-thirties, so I’ve been continually experimenting with materials and styles. I’m sure a lot of my techniques probably aren’t very textbook, but they work for me. I get genuinely excited when a new creative idea comes in my head and spend at least 9 or 10 hours everyday painting.
The thing I love most about creating pictures, is that you can totally escape into a fantasy world that you have created on a blank canvas. I live in a typical Bristol terraced house with a tiny garden and really miss the countryside where I grew up, so my work, even my cityscapes, often will focus on green spaces and try to portray the sensation of getting lost amongst nature. I paint according to mood, so one day I may throw lots of wet paint and not really know what it will look like, and other days I may try and paint something precise and figurative. That’s the joy of being a self-employed artist.
How long have you been a Friend, and what does the RWA mean to you?
I have only been a Friend for less than a year, but I have been blown away by the lovely warm community and proactive people involved. Monica Cuellar first suggested I joined the Friends and I have absolutely loved being a member so far. I have rarely entered exhibitions up until now, but it has been my New Year resolution to try and involve my work in more galleries and not just display it largely on social media, hence I applied for the Friends’ Exhibition. It’s such a welcoming group of diverse people, but everyone clearly shares a love of the visual arts and is incredibly supportive of one another.
What are you working on now?
I am working on lots of private commissions at the moment, but once those are over, I have loads of new creative plans. I’ve recently been creating landscapes involving pressed foliage picked on location, and would love to focus some work on the amazing diversity of British hedgerows.
I’m involved in the BS9 Arts Trail in June so will be producing lots more work for that event. I then head off to Glastonbury Festival and hope to produce paintings inspired by such a fun and mad weekend. I’m taking part in a lovely exhibition in Llanbedrog in the summer, so if that goes well, I may paint more pictures of the Welsh landscape.
One new venture is to create some very easy beginners video guides to acrylic painting, to share some of very simple tips to people who haven’t ever really picked up a paint brush before. I am constantly looking at how to improve my technique and learn something new almost every week, so I’m hoping people will enjoy having a go at some easy steps to get them started with painting. I started from scratch 13 years ago and can’t believe the fun I’ve had since!
See more of Jenny’s wonderful art at jennyurquhart.co.uk and follow her on Instagram @jennyurquhart
Thanks to everyone who voted and our generous sponsors Cass Art.
The Floating Circle 