Halstead: gallery owner up for third art prize

5:34pm Friday 10th October 2008

For someone who is adamantly “not a watercolourist”, Wladyslaw Mirecki rouses quite some interest from watercolour buffs.

The Chappel Galleries owner won two national art prizes last year and is now lined up for another, having caught the judges’ eye with his large, local works.

The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize had more than 800 submissions nationally, but chose Wladyslaw, known as Waj, as one of its top seven.

In its fourth year, the competition clearly liked his pieces, as it used his 2007 entry for its publicity in The Spectator newspaper.

A self-taught painter, Waj and his wife, Edna’s home and business, Chappel Galleries, is both a great showcase for his work and one of the most happily situated studios in the Colne Valley - at the foot of the magnificent Chappel Viaduct.