Saatchi Showdown runner up

Nelson-born artist Charles Olsen was runner up in the inaugural Saatchi Showdown, an online user-voted art competition run by London’s Saatchi Gallery. Olsen received £750, and priceless media exposure, for his oil portrait La Sundari. First place went to Italian photorealist painter Vania Comoretti. Olsen has been based in Madrid for the past four years, where he runs Myspace pages promoting NZ and Spanish artists: ‘Aotearoa Artists’ and ‘Artistas de España’.