Adil Amin is a Blackburn artist and submitted this piece to our Art Open 2022. He won the 2nd place 'Judge's Choice' award chosen by a panel of 3 judges- the museum's Art Curator, the Leader of the Council and artist and ceramic sculptor Halima Cassell.

Here Adil describes his work: 'During Covid-19 and the 2020 lockdowns, whilst working in a supermarket, I produced several series of self-portraits wearing hoodies, mainly working in acrylics and then later in oil paint. The work represents living life as a single working class male in a time where everyday life was uncertain to most people having to work from home. I felt undervalued, underappreciated and underpaid. I began painting "The Hoody Series".'

Sir William Menzies Coldstream, CBE (28 February 1908 – 18 February 1987) was an English realist painter and a long-standing art teacher. He mainly specialised in portraits, but also painted a number of landscapes, nudes, and still-lifes like this one. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Artillery and became an Official War Artist in 1943–5 working in the Near East and then Italy.

In 1959 after a number of years teaching he was appointed as chairman of the National Advisory Council on Art Education. The ‘Coldstream Reports’ of 1960 and 1970 helped to change the structure of art school teaching in Britain, this included the study of art history and the awarding of degree status for students at art schools.

Albert Henry Thomas Irvin (21 August 1922 – 26 March 2015) was an English expressionist abstract artist from London who specialised in painting, watercolours and screenprinting. He attended the Northampton School of Art until he joined the Royal Air Force during the Second World War to serve as a navigator.

After the war he returned to art, studying at Goldsmiths College in London. Irvin returned to Goldsmiths as a teaching in the 1960s and spent twenty years teaching there. Over the course of his career his brightly coloured abstract paintings were showcased in a number of exhibitions and entered public collection across the country. Irvin was elected to the Royal Academy in 1998 and he continued to create art into his 80s.

Marjan Wouda is a sculptor and was born in Aduard, Netherlands. She grew up around animals on her family's dairy farm which gave her a fine knowledge of the subjects she would later sculpt so realistically. She moved to England in 1979 and studied art and sculpture courses in both Manchester and London.

She has exhibited her work both in the UK and the Netherlands and has been commissioned numerous times to create works for public spaces. These works can be found in museums, parks and green spaces all over the world, ranging from Hong Kong, The Caribbean, London, Greater Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Thyme, to Yorkshire and Lancashire where she is now based.

Margaret Brynhild Parker was a painter and teacher who was brought up in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Her father was a craft teacher at St Christopher’s School, which she attended, her mother was Swedish and her uncle was Barry Parker was an architect who was responsible for much of the early development of the Garden City. She studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1925–8 and won numerous prizes during her time there.

She was part of the East London Group and after a period of time teaching in Letchworth she moved to Nice, France in 1949. Here she got to know Picasso and and joined a group of Communist-oriented artists. She continued to paint and exhibited in mixed shows and her work can be found in a number of galleries.

Halima Cassell was born in 1975 in Pakistan, brought up in Lancashire and now lives in Shropshire. She is an artist, sculptor and ceramicist and her varied, multi-cultural background is present in the work she creates. She fuses her Asian roots with a fascination for African pattern work and passion for architectural geometry and shaped. This piece, Blackburn on the Hill, is one of a number of Halima's pieces in the Blackburn collection.

Bharti Parmar is a visual artist and academic living and working in the UK who has been practicing for 30 years. She studied at the Royal College of Art London and has a doctorate in fine art. Bharti's interest and specialism is in vernacular crafts and systems that she subverts to make political statements.

She is currently developing work and exhibitions on the subject of cotton and empire. This piece was comissioned by the British Textile Biennial in 2021 and featured in her show 'Khadi' here at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery about cotton, Gandhi and colonialism in the year marking the 90th anniversary of Gandhi’s historic visit to Darwen. It was purchased from the artist in 2021.

Nina Hamnett was a British painter, designer, and illustrator. She is also famous for the flamboyant lifestyle she lived. Hamnett was born in Tenby, Wales, the daughter of an army officer. She pursued a career in art and studied at various schools in Dublin, London, and finally Paris. Here in Paris she met several leading avant-garde artists and joined a bohemian commmunity.

Hamnett is one of few women artists to write autobiographical accounts of her life. This was published in two volumes, Laughing Torso (1932), and its sequel, Is She a Lady? (1955). These works turned her into a well-known name following her descriptions of her experiences.