EDINBURGH.- The Royal Scottish Academy announced winners for three major awards funded by the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest.

• Moyna Flannigan receives the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award (£20,000).

• Olivia Irvine receives the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award (£5,000).

• Derrick Guild RSA receives the RSA Academicians Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award (£5,000).

RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award (£20,000)

The Royal Scottish Academy announced that Moyna Flannigan has been awarded the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award.

Funded by the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest and administered by the RSA, this £20,000 award intends to enable a committed painter to devote themselves exclusively to painting for a period up to 26 weeks, that would otherwise be impeded by other commitments, such as employment or caring responsibilities.

Edinburgh-based artist Moyna Flannigan’s practice centres on the representation of women in painting. Her works are an amalgamation of memory, experience and imagination, drawn from history, mythology and popular culture. She is dedicated to Painting as a discipline and medium, and addresses the development of visual language in her work by engaging with current dialogues around making and materiality.

Flannigan intends to use the award funds to embark on a period of research in central Italy of the spatial geometry, earthly colour and light of the panel paintings and frescoes of the quattrocento painters: Piero della Francesca, Tommaso Masaccio, Luca Signorelli and Andrea Mantegna. She will create her own paints to replicate the luminosity and sensuality of early painting, exploring how sculptural light activates an image within the spatial dynamics of a painting.

Moyna Flannigan said: ‘I’m really delighted to receive this painting award from the RSA, and especially pleased that it comes from the legacy of Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston who were such generous teachers when I was a student at Edinburgh College of Art. Now that I teach there myself, and I am at a different stage in my painting life, I am conscious, as perhaps they were, that painting helps me to teach, and teaching helps me to paint.

I am looking forward to the extra studio time that this award facilitates and to making paintings which look outwards and forwards into the future.’

RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award (£5,000)

The Royal Scottish Academy announced that Olivia Irvine has received the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award.

Funded by the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest and administered by the RSA, this £5,000 award enables a committed fine art painter to carry out research, development and production of a new body of work through a period of international travel.

Scottish artist Olivia Irvine uses a combination of the imagined and the observed to create her paintings, altering and intensifying memories to achieve a dreamlike and theatrical quality. Irvine will travel to South America to research how literature has influenced the theatricality and dream-like sensibilities of contemporary South American painting. She will create a new body of work inspired by her mother’s centenary year, exploring how imagination, lived experience, stories, and memories intersect in painting.

Olivia Irvine said: ‘I am delighted to have won this award. I remember both Elizabeth and John from my student days at Edinburgh College of Art, and they always had something interesting to say about painting and travel.

‘It has long been a dream of mine to go to South America and this award is finally giving me that opportunity. I plan to go to Chile and Argentina during their spring and take a bundle of concertina sketchbooks with me. There are dozens of museums, art galleries and murals in the cities and I want to visit as many as possible. I definitely want to see the Pablo Neruda houses in Chile as I am a fan of his poetry. I admire several Magic Realist authors and will seek out their influence on contemporary painting as well as my own work.’

RSA Academician Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award (£5,000)

The Royal Scottish Academy announced that Derrick Guild RSA has received the RSA Academician Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award.

Funded by the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest and administered by the RSA, this £5,000 award enables a Royal Scottish Academician that is a committed fine art painter to carry out research, development and production of a new body of work through a period of international travel.

Derrick Guild RSA’s paintings reference the European still life paintings of the 15th-19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity. Guild will use the award funds to visit the Netherlands, viewing the ongoing public accessed restoration of Paulus Potter's 1647 painting, The Young Bull.

Derrick Guild RSA said: ‘This award will allow me to make three visits to the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague, where the restoration of Paulus Potter’s 1647 painting The Young Bull is underway until the end of 2025. Completed when Potter was just 22 years of age, the painting is nearly life size. It’s such a playful and commanding depiction of a sentient living creature. When I look at reproductions of the painting, I am hit with a myriad of connections, connections that include prehistoric cave painting, Frans Snyders, Walt Disney and my childhood visits to the bull sales in Perth.

‘To be able to view some of the restoration at first hand is such an exciting prospect for me. Learning about Potter’s technique, pigments, surface and mediums will greatly influence the development of the artworks I will make in response to Potter’s wonderful work. Thank you to the RSA for supporting my proposal.’