Faces of the Midlands: Portraiture at Rugby Open

<WRITER> Marc Baker
<PHOTOGRAPHY> Marc Baker

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The Rugby Open has always been a celebration of regional talent, but this year's exhibition reveals something more urgent—a portrait collection that refuses to look away.

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Walk through the gallery and you're confronted by intimacy rendered in wildly different languages. Francis Morris's 'Man in Drama' <02> arrests you immediately: oil paint pushed thick and deliberate, golden light catching vulnerability in the sitter's gaze. It's classical portraiture with emotional weight that feels utterly contemporary.

Then there's the disquiet of Morgan Brand's 'Blue Banisters', where two figures occupy the same canvas but entirely different psychological spaces. The blue ribbon snaking between them operates like a binding or a barrier—you can't quite tell which. It's unsettling, accomplished work.

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Photography here doesn't just document; it transforms. Phoebe Bond's 'Blurred Thoughts' <03> uses motion and light to render the psyche visible, whilst Beth Drury's 'Flora Taken Over' <04> creates something dreamlike through botanical obscurity. The figure exists but only just, subsumed by nature in a way that feels both romantic and slightly ominous.

Marisa VanSchuyver's 'Serenity in Negative Space' <09> demonstrates the quiet power of restraint—a rear view, soft blues, the subject turned away. Sometimes what you don't show matters most.

Victoria Wyton-Mills took home the Brendan O'Rouke Award for 'After School' <05>, and rightly so. It's the kind of painting that makes you lean in, searching for the story in the downward gaze, the uniform, the particular quality of light.

What strikes me most is how these artists — from across Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Coventry — have converged on the human face and form not as subject matter, but as urgent question…

Who are we when we're seen?

Who are we when we choose to look away?

The Rugby Open 25: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art runs until Saturday 07, February 2026 at Rugby Art Gallery & Museum