The B. S. Art Prize has been getting off to a slow start. But now that the administrative side of things is pretty much in order and that I’ve got my retrospective awards out of the way I hope to be able to focus on the original concept of presenting on-the-spot prizes for new (or newly discovered) work.

I’ve not done very well so far at realizing the idea of on-the-spot prizes but I do still see it as a possible kind of ideal encounter to aspire to and it will be interesting to see how such encounters work out in reality. I hope to award some new prizes before too long, although I’ve been feeling too busy and too much behind schedule on my own work to be getting out and about much, but I hope to make some gradual changes in my habits, and then I may be more likely to be in the right position to make discoveries.

Another goal is to try to stop awarding prizes to anonymous persons. Sometimes it is necessary, but I really want to be able to hand the majority of awards to actual people.

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In the meantime, I’ve made several new medal designs. It may seem unnecessary at this stage, given how it has taken me several years just to award three medals, but the tin of silicone rubber which I purchased to make the mould for the first medal series had passed it’s use-by date so I thought that I’d better try to use it up. I now have moulds for the first six series of medals, which at my intended rate of twenty medals per series takes me up to award number one hundred and twenty.

I may present the new medal designs on this blog, since it seems a shame to leave them on a dusty shelf for goodness knows how long without showing them. I’m not showing them yet since I’ve run out of the low melting point metal but will probably show each series as I get around to casting them.

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