Davy, Ireland’s leading provider of stockbroking, wealth management and financial advisory services, has awarded Northern Ireland-based artist Ian Cumberland the 2010 Davy Portrait Award, worth £10,000 at a ceremony in Belfast for his captivating oil on board self portrait. The awards, in association with Arts & Business, were open to artists working in traditional and non-traditional media across Ireland. The judging panel comprised Rosie Broadley, Associate Curator of Contemporary Collections at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Brenda McParland, a renowned International Curator and Arts Management Professional in Contemporary Visual Arts. Cumberland describes the winning portrait as ‘A celebration of flaws using the marks and colour of the paint to accurately portray the flesh and bring out all the imperfections that everyone has. From a distance the painting is very realistic, but up close its quite uneven’. Ian studied ‘Fine and Applied Arts’ at University of Ulster and has exhibited at numerous solo and group exhibitions across Ireland and the UK, including Royal Ulster Academy exhibitions and the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2009 as part of the BP Portrait Awards which then toured to the Dean Gallery of the National Galleries of Scotland. Ian’s ‘Self Portrait’ can be viewed alongside 28 other shortlisted paintings selected from over 300 entries at the 2010 Davy Portrait Awards exhibition which takes place at the Naughton Gallery in Belfast from Friday 26th February 2010 and will then move to the Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin in April.