Ben Tankard - Unpopular Penguin 1096 (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Ben Tankard is a painter from the Blue Mountains in NSW. He has been a finalist in many art prizes including the Sulman, Mosman, Gallipoli, Gosford and Calleen. In 2018 he was awarded the DP World Emerging Artist Prize in the ANL Maritime Art Prize, and in 2019 he was the winner of the Hawkesbury Art Prize.

Ben’s background is in figurative and landscape painting, but since 2016 he has been concentrating on pop art, drawing imagery from sources such as Penguin book covers and the classic Monopoly board game. The first Unpopular Penguin painting was highly commended in the Blacktown City Art Prize, where Edmund Capon, former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales said ‘it is an evocative imagining of the familiar Penguin paperback…it was a painting we all liked very much for its rich texture, its sense of memory and its sort of nostalgic humour’.