Best in new show

The Daily Mail last year launched a brand new art competition known emphatically as Not the Turner Prize. Matching its foe in cash value, it is open only to figurative painters.

In a year in which submissions to the Royal Academy's summer show are down a staggering 10,000, amateur artists from the length and breadth of Britain responded to the Mail's call to brushes in the name of "real" art.

The quantity of entries meant that the four judges - commercially successful painters all - were unable to reveal their winner until last Saturday when Gerard Burns, sometime pop singer, songwriter and teacher from Glasgow, became £20,000 the richer.

Entitled The Labyrinth, Burns's vast, 7ft-wide, winning painting nods to Greek mythology and gender debates, and depicts a small girl holding a bull on a leash.

It goes on show at the Mall Galleries tomorrow, where more than 400 of the judges' other favourite entries crowd every inch of wall space.

It is an overwhelming sight: sombre selfportraits butt up against sultry landscapes, minutely detailed leopards and lions hang beside delicate studies of racehorses, and kitchensink realism flanks quasi-kitsch fantasy.

It is precisely this festive mix that makes open competitions so energising, and the dedication and enthusiasm that have gone into each of the paintings is irresistible.

There is plenty here that is unexpected, too: yes, there are scantily clad damsels, but there is also full-frontal male nudity; celebrity portraits include one of Margaret Thatcher ripping open her shirt, snapping a string of pearls and baring a Superman T-shirt.

You don't have to look too closely to spot the occasional flash of inspiration, and technical prowess is pleasantly in evidence.

Whatever your views on its manifesto, the sheer volume of interest that this newest prize has generated makes it hard for anyone passionate about art to ignore, and although it is easy to scoff, that seems somehow to miss the point.