Arts festival contest is open

With this year’s festival once again being a huge success back in June, organisers are now looking to find the next artist to benefit from the event.

Artists from Northumberland are invited to participate and the winning image will be used to publicise the 2017 festival in media coverage, on marketing literature, in social media and on the cover of the festival venue guide.

And the competition winner automatically has the right to exhibit free of charge in the lead venue, at next year’s festival, which takes place on Saturday, June 17, and Sunday, June 18, 2017, and receives a prize in the form of £150 arts vouchers.

An arts festival spokesman said: “Previous years have encouraged poster entries with the village as the theme but for this year’s festival, we are staging an open competition to create a poster which represents the festival and our desire to embrace a more diverse range of art: the main stays of visual art and craft of course, but expanding this to include performance, music, poetry, cinematography, storytelling, and installation art.

“This can include characteristics of our wonderful location, which makes it unique such as the coastline, quirky venues, our Franciscan friars, the flora and fauna, our amazing ornithology, but we’ll leave that to you.”

Last year’s winner was Peter Drew, who now lives in Alnwick and has a masters from the UK’s highest ranked art and design establishment, the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He was also runner-up to the competition in 2015.

To enter the competition, visit www. alnmouthartsfestival.com and download an application form and follow the directions for entry.

The deadline for entries is October 31 and the winning design, as chosen by a panel of the festival team, will be announced on November 4.