The judges were looking for an artwork that displayed not only originality but also craftsmanship and a true understanding of and feeling for the subject. In fact, the award was created to encourage artists using wildlife as their subjects to move away from photo-realism towards original expression, in any medium, of their sense of nature, empowered by knowledge but not necessarily either direct representation or an abstract expression.

The prize?
£1,000 and centre-stage desplay within an exhibition of recent work of winners of the BBC Wildlife Award from the past five years.

Paul is the Wildlife Liason Officer for the Northumbria Police Force and was the consultant on the BBC wildlife-crime series Badger. His passions from childhood have been wildlife and art. Though he started his career as an advertising illustrator in London, he very soon discovered that city life wasn’t for him and returned home to Northumberland, where he became a country-park ranger and then a full time police officer.

For the past seven years, he and wildlife-photographer Rob Jordan have protected a nesting colony of black grebes. The story of their discovery of the role that coots play in the fate of the colony is the subject of his painting. The story board idea was a way of conveying the complexity of the drama rather than just illustrating a moment within the story. He used charcoal and conté for the drawings then added collage comprising torn pages from a book about Thomas Bewick - the father of wildlife illustration and, like Paul, a Northumbrian.

Paul’s ambition is to create works of art that convey something of what he knows
and feels about nature - ”I seek a sense of place, of space, a feeling of light,
weather and mood...a hint of movement or habitat or behaviour.”

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