ECA student wins Fleming-Wyfold award

A final year student at Edinburgh College of Art has won the inaugural Fleming-Wyfold Award.

Morag Donkin, 22, was presented with a cheque for £2,000 at a special dinner to celebrate the launch of the prize at The Fleming Collection in London.

Simon Groom, the competition's judge and Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, said: "All the shortlisted pictures were very strong candidates and that goes to show that there is a great vibrancy in Scottish art schools. In the end it was a personal preference. Morag’s picture showed so many different passages of painting within the one work. You can carry on going back to it."

The painting, titled Redhall House 1, is oil and ink on canvas. It depicts Redhall House, once a children's home but now lying empty, on the bank of the Water of Leith a few miles from the centre of Edinburgh.

Morag, who is influenced by horror films, said: "It has a haunting quality, an atmospheric feeling to it."

"It's fantastic, I didn't expect to win. I thought that it might be perceived as being too straight because it is a landscape."

Redhall House 1 and the competition's three other shortlisted paintings are being sold by The Fleming Collection. Bids close at 17:30 on Saturday 3 November.