Edward Sutcliffe wins BP Travel Award with a painting of our very own John Myatt!

Dubbed by the British press as the Oscars of portraiture, the award is certainly one of the most important portrait prizes in the world and Edward Sutcliffe’s continued selection places him among the top in his field. He has been awarded a grant of £6,000 to travel to Los Angeles, to spend time with a group of people whose lives have been changed by the Compton Cricket Club. “It is a fantastic opportunity and I’m delighted,” says Sutcliffe. “The Compton Cricket Club is an amazing story, rich in character and powerful in emotion that I am inspired to paint...one of the things I am trying to do is get more movement in my paintings, so that is the avenue I will be going down. I am going to put everything I have into this project.”His winning piece Copycat, which is currently on show in London, is a two-part painting of our very own infamous fraudster, John Myatt, who went to prison for forging 200 paintings. Sutcliffe painted a portrait of him and then inverted and distorted the image and sent a smaller version of it to a Chinese forger in the city of Dafen, where they specialise in reproducing European paintings.“With the John Myatt painting, I was interested in making a forgery of a forger and the idea of mimicry,” says Sutcliffe. “It is the most ambitious and complicated painting I have done so far. My opinion is that if you want to be good, you can’t just rely on the talent of rendering. It has to be about the world we live in, it has to have ideas pulsing through it and that is what my work is about.” To view John Myatts collection