Every month The Circles of Art newsletter features an artist who has captured our attention. Members vote for our annual award recognising the artist whose work they find most outstanding.
Emilio Martin, January 2026
Figurative artist Emilio Martin paints family and friends who are happy “to take on the role of actors”. He works with live models, including “the cheapest sitter, myself”, directing them to dress and pose in a way that conjures up an evocative scene or enigmatic mood. He takes individual portrait commissions and is also currently exploring still lifes — nevertheless insisting “humans are are the most interesting subject in art.”
emiliomartin.co.uk @emilio.b.martin
Harry Rüdham, December 2025
Harry Rüdham’s meticulous, richly coloured paintings feature thousands of tiny silhouettes. They resemble the flight patterns of birds but are actually myriad human figures that, at a distance, merge into a whole. He describes Infrared, a homage to Van Gogh’s Starry Night, as ‘a whirlpool galaxy in an infrared photo’, reflecting his fascination with the cosmos.
harryrudham.com @harryrudham
Precious Akpotareno, November 2025
A-level student Precious Akpotareno was highly commended in the 2025 Society of Women Artists awards. She describes her work as expressing the tension between what we show and what we actually feel. Her work invites viewers to open up and to see one another from wider perspectives. She executes her paintings in oil or gouache on canvas, but her first love is drawing with pencil. She says: “I want to create an emotion, a reaction. To encourage people to stop and think.”
c/o afarrugia@heathfieldschool.net
Nigel Sharman, October 2025
Nigel Sharman’s heart lies in south-west England where his watercolourist father introduced him to the painters of the St Ives School. Inspired by their work, he paints with a limited palette in oil on canvas, focussing on rich colour, balance and order. He builds up layers, often to soften a horizon: shadows anchor the objects in his compositions. ‘I like to generate calm, a kind of meditation’, he explains.
www.nigelsharman.co.uk
Ned Elliott, September 2025
Nature in all its guises—delicate, threatening, ephemeral, exquisite—fuels Ned Elliott’s evocative work. This Royal School of Drawing graduate is fascinated by the lives of creatures in their environments, saying: ‘I try to imagine what it would be like to be my subject, to take its point of view’. He then often lets it lead him into fanciful, abstract worlds. His aim is to capture a mood and to convey a meaning, whether inspired by a blade of grass or the creatures he sees preserved in London’s Natural History Museum.
nedelliott.com. @ned_elli0tt
Ellie Ebbs, August 2025
Ellie Ebbs won this year’s Society of Women Artists’ award for an artist under 25, supported by The Circles of Art. Her winning pencil drawing, Reflection, captures her interest in form. ‘I believe form can alter our self-perception and how others view us,’ she says. ‘We can see alternate versions of ourselves, which reflect differently to others.’ Most recently she has been exploring how nature connects with the human form.
ellieebbs.3@gmail.com
Previous winners – Artist of the Year
Meredith Owen, July 2025
Artist of the Year 2024/25
Meredith Owen celebrates nature by capturing wilderness scenes set aglow by the sun or moon. She works in oil on plywood panels, often using the grain to suggest natural features such as water or sky. This Cornwall-based artist’s previous exhibition featured works inspired by her love of roaming the countryside. She explains that her meticulous, detailed brushwork “echoes the rhythm of the steps I walk in the landscapes I paint.”
meredithowen.co.uk. @meredithaowen
Jemima Spence, August 2024
Artist of the Year runner up 2024/25
Jemima Spence paints portraits in oil from life. In 2024 she was awarded The Circles of Art prize for young artists by the Society of Women Artists and her work was recently displayed by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In summer she loves to work outdoors on a very different scale, creating surreal murals for her local community in Yorkshire.
jemimaspence.com @jemimaspence.art
Max White, February 2024
Artist of the Year 2023/24
Max White evokes mood and atmosphere in his urban and marine oil paintings. From plein air sketches he paints using only two or three strong colours, investing emotion in each scene. He is drawn to the abstract, possibly influenced by his studies in architecture. His membership of the prestigious Wapping Group of Artists (pictured is The Thames by Wapping) and representation in several galleries, notably Green & Stone in a solo exhibition in May 2024, mark him out, aged 25, as a talent to watch.
www.maxwhiteartist.co.uk @maxwhiteartist
Thomas Cameron, July 2024
Artist of the Year runner-up 2023/24
When Thomas Cameron’s oil painting of a food deliverer went on show the UK’s Government Art Collection acquired it on the spot. Like so many of the artist’s works, it captures a moment that speaks volumes about urban life in Britain today. His work is often suggestive of movie stills so it’s no surprise that his current ambition is to further exploit the psychological possibilities of film and its lighting effects. He says: “Every day I find there’s a new way to approach the same subject and achieve a different result.”
thomascameronart.co.uk @thomascameronart
Daisy Denning, October 2022 – Portrait artist
Artist of the Year 2022/23
Having shown an early interest in portrait painting, Daisy Denning cemented her skill at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, which keeps traditional oil portraiture alive. Painting from life in controlled natural light in studios in London and Kent, she is inspired by such artists as Velasquez, Renaissance and 18th-century British masters and Sargent, wishing ‘to create a world within the canvas’. That she has exhibited at the Society of Women Artists and the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers and returns to Florence every year as a tutor reflects her exceptional talent. daisydenning.com
Wesley George, November 2022 – Artist
Artist of the Year runner-up 2022/23
Wesley George’s portraits pop with dazzling colour – but that’s just one of the qualities that sear his work into your mind. This self-taught artist of Vincentian-English heritage has a mission to convey the character and experience of Londoners with similar African diaspora backgrounds to his own. Dynamic urban youth culture fires his work. His mission is “to focus on the complexity of Black British identity – to dismantle traditional racial narratives and bring out every person’s individuality and emotional scope.” wesleyggeorge.com
Joseph Black, August 2021 – Artist
Artist of The Year 2021/2022
Joseph says of his precision-honed paintings: “the relationship between people and nature, and in particular between animals and their depictions in art, has always been the main focus of my work”. The musculature of horses and myriad colours of trees fuel his passion “to explore the finest details and bring them to life”. This Kent-based Courtauld Institute graduate recently had a solo show at the Jonathan Cooper Gallery, where his equine works were centre stage.
https://www.josephblackart.com
Nicola Stratton Tyler, May 2022 – Artist
Artist of The Year runner up 2021/2022
When Nicola Stratton Tyler takes her oil paints and heads for the coast, her mission is to capture not just the extraordinary landscape but also the sounds of the sea. The thunder of breakers pounding on Cornish cliffs or wind whispering through Suffolk reed beds is as integral to her work as the dramatic interplay of scenery, sea and sky. “I aim to give an immediate sense of being outside, of natural forms, the play of light, the rumble of the waves” she says. Her paintings convey pure delight in the contrasting countryside around her low-lying East Anglian home, with its vast skies, and the rugged West Country, where she regularly holidays.
nicolastrattontyler.co.uk
Tim Gilpin, April 2021 – Painter
Artist of The Year 2020/2021
Tim Gilpin’s paintings not only capture the eye but envelop you within the lush surroundings of their canvas. He chooses the slow-drying intense medium of an oil palette to bind together the brilliant colours he loves. Working initially from a photograph of a room or hotel interior, Gilpin draws a composition of lines and shapes that he then manipulates and scales onto large, square-format canvases.
tgart.artweb.com
Emily Wilson , August 2020 – Painter
Artist of The Year runner up 2020/2021
Portrait artist Emily Wilson captures the elusive essence of childhood with her iridescent watercolour paintings. The arrival of her first-born son rekindled her artistic creativity and she has progressed from depicting him to taking photo-to-portrait commissions. Her passion for painting and drawing, conveying a child’s pure joy for life, appears in every piece.