London is one of the finest centres for visual art in the world, but it is - and always has been - rather self-absorbed. If you are a talented young painter living in Cornwall or Lincolnshire or the North West of England, it is still a daily battle to find serious audiences for your work, let alone sell enough to make a meagre living.

More than half the individuals in my section come from the Manchester area, which is also my home, where they survive as professional artists by supplementing their income through teaching or part-time jobs and a degree of frugality that puts their metropolitan cousins to shame. But they are all utterly serious about their art and it has been a deep and continual pleasure to watch their work mature over the years. This is real painting, not necessarily fashionable or streetwise, but full of belief in the making of delicate, teasing and intelligent images about human perception and shared experience.

My remaining choices are perhaps challenging in different ways, ranging from a Degas-like printmaker to a conjurer with masking tape, a master of the boxed fragment and a transcendent cityscapist. If some of them play at the edges of painting, each offers delights for the eye and the mind, and each is worthy of our sustained and respectful attention.

 

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