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Moyna is standing in the doorway to a her studio, leaning on the door frame. She is dressed in black, with white paint marks on the front of her garments. To one side of her is a full bookshelf, to the other a striking, large blue painting of a woman in front of what looks like a white, electrical flash in the sky. Two smaller pieces of work are on a drawing board in the foreground, each featuring painted body parts.

Lecturer in fine art Moyna Flannigan has been announced as the recipient of this year’s RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award.

The award is intended to enable a committed painter to devote themselves exclusively to painting for a period up to 26 weeks. Moyna will receive £20,000, and will use the funds to embark on a period of research in central Italy, investigating the spatial geometry, earthly colour and light of the panel paintings and frescoes of the quattrocento painters: Piero della Francesca, Tommaso Masaccio, Luca Signorelli and Andrea Mantegna.

She said: “I’m really delighted to receive this painting award from the RSA, and especially pleased that it comes from the legacy of Elizabeth Blackadder and John Houston who were such generous teachers when I was a student at Edinburgh College of Art. Now that I teach there myself, and I am at a different stage in my painting life, I am conscious, as perhaps they were, that painting helps me to teach, and teaching helps me to paint.

"I am looking forward to the extra studio time that this award facilitates and to making paintings which look outwards and forwards into the future."

Also receiving an award from the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest is ECA alumna Olivia Irvine, who has been granted the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Travel Award of £5,000. The award is intended to enable an artist to carry out the research, development and production of a new body of work through a period of international travel, and Olivia plans to use the award to visit South America, researching how literature has influenced the theatricality and dream-like sensibilities of contemporary South American painting.

She said: “I am delighted to have won this award. I remember both Elizabeth and John from my student days at Edinburgh College of Art, and they always had something interesting to say about painting and travel.”

Both Moyna and Olivia graduated with BA Hons in Painting in 1985.

The third recipient is Derrick Guild, RSA, who also receives a Mid-Career Travel Award, and will use it to visit the Netherlands, viewing the ongoing public accessed restoration of Paulus Potter's 1647 painting, The Young Bull.

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