Tom Faber wins the Tour 2019 Art Competition

This year’s theme was ‘Lost and Found’ and the winner is Tom Faber with his piece ‘Composition After Saint Anthony’.

‘I’m delighted to win this competition and to work with Glyndebourne’ says Tom, ‘I’ve always enjoyed how opera combines many artforms and increasingly I’m using music as a basis for new images and animations. This is a great opportunity to develop and share these interests with a wider audience.’

You can order a copy of the Tour Programme from our shop for £5. The Tour Programme is packed with fascinating in-depth articles about this year’s operas, along with full details of the cast and creative teams.

You can read more about the winning artwork, plus second and third place winners Inês Miguel Oliveira and Sharon Adebisi below.

All of the shortlisted artworks will be on display in Gallery 94, our permanent exhibition space, during Tour 2019 performances at Glyndebourne, and are available to buy.

Tom Faber is our 2019 winner and you’ll find his winning entry entitled Composition After Saint Anthony on the cover of this Tour programme.

Explaining his creative process he notes ‘my work examines the relationship between painting and digital media, and what it means to construct an image of the natural environment. Gathering scans of paint marks and organic materials – soil, leaves, animal marks – I then reformulate these digitally into “paintings”.’

For his competition submission, he took St Anthony – the patron saint of lost things – and combined the old with the new as he explains: ‘It is constructed by digital collage from scans of cardboard cups in which I had washed paintbrushes. It is also a digital reinvention of The Torment of Saint Anthony (Michelangelo, 1487-88), which was itself a copy of an older work – all depicting the connections between humans and creatures. The work explores what an ancestral image might look like if it was ‘lost and found’, by recycling away the figure and re-discovering mythological and tragic qualities in a different context. What is left is what an organic being might look like in an increasingly computerised, post-human world.’

Based in Edinburgh and London, Tom (26) is a graduate of Chelsea College of Arts (Graduate Diploma in Fine Art), 2018 and the University of Cambridge (BA Hons History of Art), 2015.

In third place is Sharon Adebisi from London with Satin Obscurity.

Sharon’s background is not that of a traditional artist. Having gained a biological sciences degree in 2017 she volunteered to work in a small rural village in Cambodia where she discovered the significance of art within society.

Unable to verbally communicate with her host family and her new community due to the language barrier, she used drawings to communicate and, since then, she has created art purely to communicate her thoughts on the journey through her 20s, through colour-rich, semi-abstract paintings focused on portraiture.

For her entry she was inspired by the intricate details in the robes of portraits created during the Renaissance: ‘I decided to create a majestic portrait of my own, using the sari line Kanyä London as a muse. My subject is a reflection of myself post-higher education – she has found what she likes, and what she wants, but is lost in the sense that she doesn’t yet know who she really is.’