The Bax family is delighted to continue to support the Black Swan Open Art competition by awarding a prize of £250 to the winner of the Fine Art category.
This will be the eighth time that the family has awarded this prize as they recognise the importance of this competition in encouraging the arts to flourish. They also recognise the vital role the Black Swan Art Gallery is playing in the artistic and cultural life of the area.
The Bax Fine Art Award will be presented to the winner by members of the family on Friday 5th December at the Black Swan Gallery. Artist Olivia Bax will work with the other judges to select the winner. The prize is given in memory of their grandfather, Claude Bax, who was an artist of the Newlyn School of Painting having studied under Stanhope Forbes.
The following is an extract from the book ‘Posing the Model’ by Iris M Green. It is a study of students of Stanhope Forbes Newlyn School of Painting 1899 – 1941:
“Claude Waldo Gordon Bax was born in Streatham in 1883 and spent his childhood in Hampstead. His indifferent health as an asthma sufferer probably made Newlyn with its pure air particularly attractive for his artistic studies. He was a contemporary of the Procters at Forbes’ School of painting. Bax was a painter of landscape, still life and of portraits. Like Hereward Tresidder and Frances Ellis, he had particular skill in portrait painting in which both Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes were fine tutors.”
The family is pleased to be associated with the Black Swan Arts, recognising its importance as a centre for promoting quality, contemporary crafts and visual arts of both established and emerging artists together with the training, support and spaces it offers emerging artists/makers and those wishing to build a career in the creative industries.