Oil Runner Up 2026

Archie Franks

Midsummer Match

Jackson's Art Prize 2026
Oil, Spray Paint
Panel
23 x 31 cm

£1,400

“A dreamscape of British national identity and a sense of  place in principle is the driving force behind much of my work.  The cultural and leisure activities of food, cricket, and the fairground, for instance , the motifs and mores of an English consumer landscape are eagerly investigated through my painting. In literature, painting and fact, the fairground almost automatically carries the idea of transient pleasure and fun as it passes through town. I am aware that this can also allude to the art fair and the creeping notion of art itself being like a fairground attraction. While my intense impacted still lives and portraits attempt to create a sense of presence, the landscapes are more about a sense of nostalgia and perhaps a notion that that nostalgia is in fact haunted. For example as a motif cricket seemed fitting in trying to conjure up a sense of Englishness, with sport as a colonial export, with the players dressed in white looking like ghosts in the landscape. Although the emphasis from painting to painting might alter slightly, a gothic atmosphere does permeate all the work. Memory, decadence, and a dream like unreality remain the core recurring themes.”