Ben Tankard

BIOGRAPHY

Ben Tankard is a painter from the Blue Mountains, his works have made the finals of numerous awards and prizes including the Sulman Prize, Mosman Art Prize , Gallipoli Art Prize, Gosford Art Prize and the Calleen Art Award. In 2018 he was awarded the DP World Emerging Artist Prize in the ANL Maritime Art Prize, and in 2019 he was the winner of the Hawkesbury Art Prize.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ben’s background is in figurative and landscape painting, but since 2016 he has been concentrating on pop art, drawing imagery from Penguin book covers and the classic Monopoly board game. The first Unpopular Penguin painting was highly commended in the Blacktown City Art Prize, where Edmund Capon, former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales said ‘it is an evocative imagining of the familiar Penguin paperback…it was a painting we all liked very much for its rich texture, its sense of memory and its sort of nostalgic humour’.

Ben Tankard CV