A NEW award has been launched to champion budding young painters in the North.

The New Lights prize, worth £10,000 to the winner, is to provide a springboard for young artists to turn professional.

Applicants must be aged between 23 and 35 and live in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Durham or Cumbria.

Artists who have studied in these counties and hold a recognised arts-based degree are also eligible.

The award has been welcomed by Ed Vaizey, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries, who described the prize as “a fantastic way of showing that great contemporary art is vibrant across the country.”

The funding comes from private sources and is entirely philanthropic.

The winner will receive £10,000 in cash, be given an exhibition and receive business mentoring. He or she will also have a second chance of showing work by being included in the following New Lights prize exhibition that will be held in two years’ time.

Kate Brindley, director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) and a national advisor for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Art Funding Programme, is one of the judges, along with Paul Hobson, director of the Contemporary Arts Society, and William Tillyer, the international artist who was born in Middlesbrough and lives in the region.

Said Ms Brindley: “In the current frozen climate for arts funding, the New Lights prize is really welcome.

There is so much talent here in the North of England that goes unrecognised.

“I believe this prize will become a beacon for aspiring young artists and will launch some famous careers.”

The award’s originator and chief executive of New Lights, Annette Petchey, said: “Aspiring young painters in the North have the odds stacked against them. The low prices that good quality paintings fetch outside London and the South-East means those artists simply cannot afford to turn professional.

“This prize will recognise, nurture and promote young talent. It will also provide a superb platform for other shortlisted artists to exhibit their work”.

Paintings entered must be in oil, acrylic, watercolours or mixed media. The winners will be announced on September 22 at a special preview of the exhibition at the Mercer Gallery, Harrogate, containing all the short-listed entries. It will be open to the public from September 24 until the end of the year.

Anyone interested in submitting an entry should go to the New Lights website: newlights.org.uk and download an entry form, or email info@newlights.org.uk.

• William Tillyer is one of more than two dozen artists from the UK whose work will be shown in Sixty Years of British Art at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, in New York, from March 2- April 2, alongside such leading names as Henry Moore, Anthony Caro, Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, Lucien Freud and David Hockney.