LUDLOW'S Silk Top Hat Gallery is delighted to announce that Michael Williams has just been awarded second place in the 2015 Sunday Times Watercolour Competition. The artist has been a regular exhibitor at the Silk Top Hat Gallery since 1982 and has had six solo shows here. The Sunday Times competition, now in its 28th year, is the largest and most prestigious showcase of contemporary watercolour painting in the UK. The competition aims to celebrate and reward excellence and originality in the medium of watercolour.

Michael Williams was awarded the second prize of £6,000 for 'Land, Sea, Island', which depicts the Welsh island of Skomer across a turbulent stretch of water called Jack Sound. The island, off the southwest corner of Pembrokeshire, is a barely inhabited nature reserve. He has known it for decades, but still hasn't reached it; and it's this sense of it being a paradise 'out there' that inspired him. He impressed the judges with his portrayal of the earth, water and sky, each section nuanced in its own way. There are those intriguing white lines weaving through the picture; it is a picture of many layers, in many senses. The artist explained the intricate way he constructed the painting, 'I am now using a language of "striation" by which all representation is first taken through bands of underpainting. Between the bands there are lines or "threads of light", which give movement and an embedded structure to what is also a precise take on the details of the world.' It's a technique he has been developing for a few years: 'I'm never sure if the lines go across the landscape, like the direction of light, or whether they follow the geology of the landscape or the currents of water. All of those are possibilities.'

Michael Williams was born in India, but later moved to London, where he taught Art History at Central Saint Martins and then Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the seventies he moved to Powys which, he claims, 'led to a shift from a "pop art" tendency to a kind of Ruskinian landscape painting'.

The judging panel this year comprised the artists Sara Dudman and Lucy Willis; Desmond Shawe-Taylor LVO, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures; Josh Spero, editor of Spear's Magazine and Louis Wise, The Sunday Times critic and writer.

A selection of all the shortlisted works, ninety works by eighty artists - will be on show at the Mall Galleries, London from September 14-19. The London show will be followed by a tour to venues across the UK, including Castle Fine Art, Birmingham (October 10-18) and Guildford House Gallery, Guildford (November 14-January 2, 2016).

Current exhibitions at the Silk Top Hat Gallery 'Some Things Left Unsaid' an exhibition of new work by Simon Dorrell and exhibition of etchings and watercolours by Keith Andrew.

For further information or images: 01584 875363 silktophatgallery.wordpress.com.