Emma Haworth

Emma Haworth is a painter of the urban scene. Her art is built upon meticulous observation of the ebb and flow of modern metropolitan life - in the streets, the parks, the squares of London, New York, Paris or some other great urban centre: it is a constantly shifting drama, of moving people and changing light, played out in a great arena that is both architectural and natural.

Emma Haworth's disciplines her vision of this teeming stage through long study as well as through sketching and photography. The scene before her is one of extraordinary complexity, a complexity that she readily embraces. She is somehow able to distil both the telling, individual detail - the plastic bag caught in the branches of a winter tree, the Hyde Park sunbather's slim-line briefcase - and a vital sense of the whole panorama - the quality of light falling through London plane trees or bouncing off New York skyscrapers, the sense of movement in a crowd, the sense of pleasure on a Bank Holiday. 

Emma Haworth's work has received wide critical recognition. She was awarded the Woodhay Picture Gallery Prize by the New English Art Club in 2001, and was nominated for the Hunting Art Prize at the Royal College of Art in both 1999 and 2000. In 2010 she won joint First Prize in the National Art Open Competition, as well as First Prize in The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition.

Frank Whitford, the Sunday Times art critic, and one of the judges of the competition, praised her painting, Snowy Woods:

The rigorous structure (of Emma Haworth's artwork) recalls late-medieval, early-Renaissance composition - think of Piero di Cosimo, for instance - although I am also reminded of Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow. High praise, but not excessive, I think.