Scott McCracken 'Big Crunch'

Turps Banana is delighted to announce Scott McCracken has been awarded the Darbyshire Prize for Emerging Art 2017.  He was selected by Mark Darbyshire and previous recipient Adam Hennessey from participants on the Turps Painting Studio Programme 2016-17.  His solo exhibition, Big Crunch, opens on 25th October 6-8.30pm at the Darbyshire London Showroom.

Scott McCracken has spent the past two years in the heart of south London, painting in the Turps Studios on the Aylesbury estate.  During these two years, his work altered, mutated, reformed and transformed to what we see today; a collection of confident and visually stimulating paintings. While small in scale, abstract in form and pictorial in attitude, his paintings cleverly use elements that resist resolution into an overall picture - yet never totally collapsing into separate freestanding parts. Everything in the paintings needs what’s around them to achieve a temporary stability.

"Perhaps it is contrived to think of a single system that can embody all our desires and aspirations. However, in Scott McCracken’s work I find comfort, a vision that articulates my questions, just as it offers a place of retreat. A place where vitality of thought and the lightness of sensations still roam in wonderment, offering solutions and a momentary way out, which affirms paintings’ pursuit and meaning."
Andrea Medjesi-Jones
Turps Studio Programme Mentor
         

The Darbyshire Prize originally began in 2007 as an annual award and exhibition hosted by Stroud Valley Artspace in Gloucestershire and ran until 2009.  Following a conversation between Marcus Harvey (Painter and co-founder of the Turps Painting Magazine and Art School) and Mark Darbyshire, the prize has been resurrected as an annual prize awarded to a participant on the Turps Studio Programme. The Darbyshire Prize includes a solo exhibition at Darbyshire’s London Showroom and £1,000 of Darbyshire services.

Turps Studio Programme is an intensive one to two year practice-based programme in a highly supportive open studio led by established painters.