After retirement, many people find at last they have the time to take up painting, drawing and photography.

Having the time to become more involved in creative endeavours is one of the wonderful aspects of retirement and this is why of course we have been running here at laterlife.com a regular monthly art section. For almost five years we have been bringing our readers a monthly art feature, taken from the website Painters Online and their magazines, The Leisure Painter and The Artist.

These two magazines help sponsor an excellent art competition specially for retired people.

The special awards programme, called the Over 60s Art Awards, is run by the Elderly Accommodation Counsel (EAC) to celebrate the talent and creativity of amateur artists who are over 60 years old.

The EAC have been running this competition since 1995 and over the years, it has attracted entries from around 25,000 amateur artists.

The artists’ work is categorised into eight main groups: landscapes and seascapes; still life; watercolours; drawing; oil and portrait plus there are categories for photography and 3D work as well.

There are also a number of special categories including for the first time this year, a People’s Choice award.

In this year’s award, work was initially judged on reproduced images of the artists’ work, either jpeg digital files or colour photographs. The main judging panel included Sally Bulgin, editor of the Artist Magazine, and celebrated artist Tom Coates.

The work of 101 selected finalists when then included in a special exhibition at the Bankside London in London. This attracted a good number of visitors and also results in several of the works being sold.

The winners chosen by The Artist and Leisure Painter magazines were:

Gillian Flack's oil painting 'Onions and blue vase' was chosen by
Leisure Painter for their prize, she won a one year subscription to
the magazine. Gillian is 71 and comes from Everton, Bedfordshire.

 Onions and blue vase

Brian Collins' watercolour 'A shady spot, Luxor' won a year
subscription to the Artist. Brian is 70, from North Harrow, Middlesex.

'A shady spot, Luxor'

You can see these wonderful pictures and also other selected entries on the EAC Website http://eacartawards.org.uk/voting.aspx?yr=2009

This month Laterlife have copied another great art feature from the Painters online website, How to improve your paintings and perhaps, who knows, if you’ve had any thoughts of taking up sketching or painting this might encourage you to make a start. And perhaps, you might be surprised by your talent and decided to take part yourself in next year’s EAC Over 60s Art Awards. Details will be up on their website later on in 2010. You can contact them by phone on 01704 893251 or email mar.millington@eac.org.uk

laterlife interest

The above article is part of the features section of laterlife.com called laterlife interest. laterlife interest contains a variety of articles of interest for visitors to laterlife.com written by a number of experienced and new journalists.

It includes both one off articles and also associated regular columns of a more specialist nature such as Healthwise, Talkback, Gardener's Diary, and a beauty section called Looking good in later life.

There's also 'It could be you' by Maggi Stamp laterlife's counsellor on human relationships. 

Also don't forget to take a look at our regular IT question and answer section called YoucandoIT by IT trainer and author Jackie Sherman.

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