Back in September 2024 I took part in Art Battle Bristol. It’s a live painting competition, and this one was held at We The Curious on Millennium Square, down on the Harbourside. If you’ve never been to one, the format is honestly a little terrifying. You paint from a blank canvas in front of a live audience, against the clock, and the crowd votes for their favourite at the end of each round.
It was my Art Battle debut. I’m a registered Art Battle artist now, and Bristol is where it all started for me.
The thing is, I usually work really slowly. My sea paintings and my commissions get built up in careful layers over days. So having twenty minutes and a whole room of people watching was about as far from my normal way of working as I could get. There’s nowhere to hide. No going back, no quiet studio. Just you, the canvas and the clock.
And I loved it. It was an incredible night, so much emotion, the kind of adrenaline you can’t really find anywhere else. Somehow, against everything I expected from the format, I actually finished the piece. It turned out to be one of the most personal things I’ve ever painted. A woman’s bust, titled A Plea for Peace, an appeal for peace and for respect for life, seen through the eyes of a contemporary woman. Painting something that raw and that fast, in front of a crowd, is something I’ll never forget.
The four studies below are what got me ready for the night. Every one of them was painted in twenty minutes, the same time limit as the battle itself, and a few of them I’d already finished before the competition. They’re all bust portraits of a woman, each in a different medium: acrylic, acrylic markers, and marker pen. Pushing through all those techniques under that kind of time pressure was the best training I could have done.
These preparation pieces are available. If any of them speak to you, just send me an enquiry. I’m happy to share all of them, and a few can still be completed into finished paintings if you’d like. Each one is a one-off, a little snapshot of the process behind that night.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t the competition itself. It was the atmosphere. A whole room of people in Bristol who came out on a Saturday night just to watch paint happen. It reminded me that art isn’t only quiet and solitary. Sometimes it’s loud and live and shared. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
Study of a woman’s bust portrait in acrylic, preparation for Art Battle Bristol