The Roland Manuel Memorial Prize 2025
The first line you make on a page can embody your spirit and intention
A competition, open to all, for a sketch.
The name of the competition is a reference to the idea that while you can work up a piece, and polish it, somehow the first lines you make on the paper always embody your spirit and your intention.
The Roland Manuel Memorial prize, awarded in conjunction with the Blake Cottage Trust, is in memory of Roland Bonham Manuel whose private sketches and notes embody the vitality and freedom of the imagination.
William Blake's notebook is held in the British Library and is full of sketches and ideas serving as sources for his later work.
We are looking for a piece, created traditionally not digitally, which embodies the freedom and self-expression of a private sketch book. We want a piece that is not highly polished and finished, but free and expressive. This Prize is open to everyone - if you loved Art at school or college, but work and family took you in a different direction, we'd love to encourage you to take this chance to pick up that pencil again.
Sketches can be in any traditional medium, in colour, line or tonal (as you prefer) and on paper. Entries must be submitted in the form of an unfiltered photograph taken in good light, in a setting of your choice. We'd love to see your choice drawing tools included in the photograph too, but this is optional. Digital art will not be considered; in this age of screens and digital manipulation, we are keen to use this prize to celebrate what is real and tangible, and to appreciate the different qualities of different traditional drawing materials.
Whilst entry and shortlisting is online we would hope that some of our short-listed sketches can be exhibited near the location of Blake's Cottage in Felpham where William Blake lived.
• [ ] Free to enter
• [ ] Roland Manuel Memorial Prize £700
• [ ] Jim Brooks Memorial Bognor Student Award £200
sponsored by the Brooks Family Project
Rules: All entries should be submitted as JPEG's via the entry form or by emailing Blakefestival@gmail.com
From individuals who if short-listed will provide a valid name, address, email and age if under 18 as of 22/9/2025.
The Jim Brooks Student Award
is only open to 12-17 year olds who attend schools or live in the Bognor Regis area postcodes PO21 & PO22 - sponsored by the Brooks Family Project
2025 Competition now closed.
(Deadline for Entries - 30 August 2025)
Meet the Judges
Tamsin Rosewell
Tamsin Rosewell is an illustrator, artist, historian, broadcaster and bookseller. She hosted the Folk Show for Radio Warwickshire and in 2015 wrote and presented a three-part series about the work of William Blake for Resonance FM.
Tamsin works mainly in ink on canvas, and owns the most spectacular collection of inks and liquid pigments from all over the world. But she has been known to just use a pencil.
Paul Nicholls
Paul Nicholls is a Bafta Award Winning Director.
He gained a first class Masters in architecture at The Bartlett UCL in 2011 before going onto co-found Factory Fifteen where he acts as CEO and Chief Creative officer and over the past 14 years (through the alias of Factory Fifteen), Paul has directed films & animations.
Mikey Georgeson
Mikey Georgeson is an English artist, working in various media. He is a painter and illustrator, who regularly exhibits his work at Sartorial Contemporary Art and other galleries.
As "the Vessel", he is songwriter and singer of the cult art-rock band, David Devant and his Spirit Wife. Mikey like Roland attended the Worthing College of Art and has been awarded a doctorate in fine art where he still works as an “uniquely innovative lecturer”.
Jackie White
Jackie studied BTEC in Graphics and Illustration at Northbrook Worthing in the 1990’s, then studied part time Fine Art degree at The Surrey Institute Farnham (Surrey University). After leaving college she started teaching for West Sussex council as an adult Education tutor and completed a PGCE, Jackie taught a variety of different courses using different materials always specialising in figurative work.
Jackie later joined ‘2 x 4 Arts’ and worked collaboratively in numerous community projects across a wide variety of age groups . More recently she has spent time on her own work, and hybrid printing. Jackie has taken part in exhibitions locally in Sussex and South London.
Judging Criteria - Roland's Notebook
- The value of the prize ‘is a truly relational one to the amount of awareness it reveals’. If you award the prize to a sketch ‘it must be because it passes its awareness onto you’.
- ‘Creativity is the start of the finished line’
- ‘Expresses something of the artist and/or itself’
- ‘Reveals something beyond what the viewer has seen or experienced’
- It can be either Physical or Abstract
- ‘The abstract is that which is not capable of stating itself so I must help’
- ‘To see something that is beautiful, doing as much work with it for myself is surely the greatest of all arts’
- ‘The combination of the desire to create of the artist, the naturalness, openness of the artless and the technical ability of the artisan is what could be called pure and true creativity’.
- ‘When there is in a room: a model, an artist, an easel, paint and other non-intelligent objects the most knowledgeable item is the painting’.
The Competition - Rules
- Free to enter
- Roland Manuel Prize £700
- Jim Brooks Student Award £200 (Under 18)
- All entries should be submitted as JPEG's through email blakefestival@gmail.com or via the entry form.
- From individuals who if short-listed will provide a valid name, address, email (and age if under 18, as of 22/9/2025).
- School’s Prize is open to Bognor Pupils 12- 18 or with a PO21 or PO22 residential address.
- Deadline for Entries 30 August 2025