Carolyn Blake’s work ‘In Undiminished Splendour’ has been selected for inclusion in the John Moores Painting Prize 2025. This distinguished exhibition, long regarded as one of the pinnacles of contemporary British painting, opened at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, on 6 September and will run until 1 March 2026.
Now in its seventh decade, the John Moores Painting Prize has brought national attention to some of the most significant artists working in the UK today. Its roll call of past winners includes David Hockney, Rose Wylie, Peter Doig, Mary Martin, and the competition’s inaugural patron, Sir Peter Blake. Each year, the winning artist is offered the opportunity for a major solo exhibition at the Walker. For 2025, that accolade has gone to Ally Fallon, the youngest-ever recipient since the prize’s inception in 1957.
Blake’s exhibited painting, an oil on canvas, depicts a derelict structure and weathered electrical box, their brutal surfaces overlaid with graffiti, standing alongside a pedestrian pathway by a railway line. Created in 2023, it belongs to Blake’s long-form series, ‘The Unchanging Traveller’, conceived over the past five years.
“The series began in August 2019 with the vantage point of a train window,” she reflects. “As a passenger, I am placed within a kind of non-space, observing fragments of the built world juxtaposed against the natural environment. At speed, these fleeting glances allow a moment of suspension, the ordinary recast as something resonant.”
Initially constrained to a modest square format to liberate the paintings from the conventions of ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’ orientation, Blake’s works since 2021 have expanded in scale and rhythm, allowing the subjects – the stairs, lamp posts, crossing gates, overpasses, and iron span of bridges – to command a presence of their own. They dwell not on grandeur, but on the delicate poetics of the overlooked.
The later titles in the series reference W.G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’, another meditation on journey and observation. Blake notes: “What I record are the ‘non-events’ of the everyday. Always in oil, my language is the inconsequential, the peripheral – the barely noticed but deeply felt. Working with a reduced palette on an apricot ground offers me not just tonal subtlety but also an otherworldliness that I cannot imagine achieving in any other medium.”
As the series unfolds, Blake transforms the ephemeral into something enduring; passing countryside, forgotten stairwells, waiting benches and worn facades, imbued with mystery through the ebb and flow of brushwork.
Her exhibition ‘Further Than Memory Can Reach’ at Winterbourne House & Gardens in Birmingham recently closed in September 2025, but the paintings from both this series and ‘The Unchanging Traveller’ series can be explored on her website, www.carolynblake.com. Prints of ‘In Undiminished Splendour’ are available from Liverpool Museums, while visitors to the Walker Art Gallery can view the painting alongside all works shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize until March 2026.