Aussie $100,00 Art Prize

A relatively unknown artist from Melbourne has won the richest art prize in Australia.
Prudence Flint won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, collecting $100,000 prize money. Ms Flint was chosen from 30 finalists for her work called A fine romance number nine.
Ms Flint says was shocked by the win. "Because my painting is not really a classic portrait at all and so I wasn't really expecting to, so that's why I am really thrilled," she said.
She says historically women have been painted as objects in the past, so she has deliberately painted the abstract of herself in a modern context.
"I wanted the woman to look really kind of occupied and doing something very modern and important so because I think it is very much what women do these days is they work hard," Ms Flint said.
Ms Flint says she plans to buy a house, a laptop computer and build a studio with her prize money.

Art Fakers v The Computer

Art historians have long used scientific tools to decide whether artworks are real or fakes - counting isotopes in lead-based paints and shining X-ray and infrared radiation on oil portraits to discover what lies beneath.
Now researchers at Dartmouth College have fed digitally scanned artworks into a computer and then used image-processing techniques to create statistics describing the pen and brush strokes. The computer analysis detects subtle differences in these strokes that help distinguish an artist from an imitator.
The scientists tried it out on drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Flemish master. The computer program agreed with the Bruegel experts, grouping eight drawings attributed to Bruegel in one category and assigning the imitations to a separate pile.
Irish Art

Canadian Stolen Art Saga

A Canadian family scored a major legal victory when a judge in the Czech Republic agreed that they should gain possession of a collection of Klimt, Ensor, Liebermann and Kokoschka paintings worth millions of dollars despite delaying tactics by the Czech authorities.
The Federer family sued two small public galleries in Ostrava and Pardubice to reclaim the works, part of more than 130 artworks collected by their Jewish grandfather Oskar Federer, before the start of the Second World War then later confiscated by Communists.
The Oskar Federer collection included paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Utrillo, Manet, Matisse and Derain among many others. More than half the collection - now worth tens of millions of dollars - remains unaccounted for.
Irish Art

Vermeer Studio found

The original studio of 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer has been found in Delft. Interest in Vermeer by the general public has soared since the successful movie "Girl with A Pearl Earring" was released - which fictionalised the situation that inspired the painting.
Daan Hartmann, a famous art restorer and expert on authenticating Vermeer found the studio. He had been working in it himself for last 20 years until he finally made the Vermeer connection. The studio, once hidden in an overgrown garden, is likely to become a major Dutch tourist attraction.
Irish Art

The Future of Irish Art?

A number of French-inspired masterpieces from budding Ulster in Bloom artists in Londonderry have arrived through the doors at the Translink Belfast Central Station, making the 2004 schools art competition the best ever, according to the organisers.
Now in its fourth year, the Ulster in Bloom Schools Art Competition encourages pupils to be inspired by the masterpieces of French artist Henri Matisse, and has proved to be a great success with almost 70 schools from across Northern Ireland submitting entries.
Irish Art

Saatchi shark sold for six million

The Damien Hirst shark in formaldehyde is reported as being sold to a mystery US buyer for 6.2m pounds in a deal to be finalised early in the new year.
Charles Saatchi paid 50,000 pounds to Hirst for the work called "The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living" who used a shark bought in Australia 14 years ago.
It was then shown a year later in the "Young British Artists" exhibition and caused interest and controversy.
Irish Art