George Jackson wins the Hermione Hammond Drawing Award 2019

Established in 2012, the Hermione Hammond Drawing Award was created in memory of the artist Hermione Hammond (1910-2005) to encourage young talent to develop their drawing skills.

George Jackson, 21 years old and studying at Wimbledon College of Arts, has won the first prize of £2,000 in this year’s Hermione Hammond Drawing Award for his ink drawing of a ‘man having his arm ravaged by a black dog’.  

Dominika Wroblewska, 26, studying at Manchester School of Art has won the runner-up prize of Cass Art vouchers worth £250 for her drawing Mine Shaft Lid Hauling, which documents the Technical Speleological Group hauling an 800kg steel lid to be secured on a mine shaft on top of a hill in winds of up to 40 miles per hour.

 ‘Black Dog Bite’ by George Jackson, Ink on paper, 59 x 42 cm, 2018

Guest Judge Charles Williams led the panel of four judges representing Hermione Hammond’s family and Mall Galleries. Charles is a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Watercolour Society and the Small Paintings Group. He teaches drawing and has begun his own PhD studies at Canterbury Christ Church University.

The panel awarded the first prize to George for Black Dog Bite, about which Charles says, “It’s great to see the spirit of British satirical pen and ink work, the tradition of Gillray, Rowlandson, Searle and Scarfe, is still going strong in young, contemporary visual art. The whole set of work that George submitted was excellent and bodes well for the future and it was hard to make a choice!”

‘Mine Shaft Lid Hauling’ by Dominika Wroblewska, Technical pen, 13 x 19 cm, 2019

Charles says about runner-up Dominika’s drawing in technical pen, “Dominika submitted a fascinating set of ethnographic drawings, recording caving activity in adverse weather conditions by specialist engineers, drawings that can function as data as well as aesthetic objects. Drawing is used for all sorts of things; what we tend to think of as the traditional skill of life-drawing, for example, was only really formulated as part of the eighteenth-century Academic project of making history-paintings, and this work reflects that.”

Charles went on to say, “Judging this competition was particularly difficult. There were some excellent examples of what drawing can be and another set of judges could have chosen two completely different and equally compelling winners. In the end one has to go with one’s own interests and fixations, though.”