Street art, Greta Thunberg and Linnaeus - meet the winner of our portrait competition
Find out about the winner of our 2022 New Portrait Competition
Published on 21st December 2022
We would like to say a massive congratulations to 13-year-old Sigge Lovevind from Sweden who has won our 2022 New Portrait Competition. His amazing graffiti portrait of Carl Linnaeus and Greta Thunberg wowed our judging panel with its creativity and message for the future.
We run our annual New Portrait Competition, inviting young people to create a new portrait that Carl Linnaeus would really like.
This year, 8-13-year-olds were tasked with creating a portrait of their nature hero!
Nature heroes are people who make efforts to better understand, value, and protect the natural world.
60 young people from across the world entered the competition. As well as portraits from children in the UK, we received entries from countries including India, Sweden, Canada and Ukraine.
We were amazed by the wonderful portraits of nature heroes. We received portraits that were all very different and marvellous, showing great skill and effort.
This is what Sigge had to tell us about his winning portrait:
“I have been doing street art for about two years now. And I love it!
The principal at my school (Sundsvall, Sweden.) gave me the link to this amazing competition when we were talking about art and graffiti and how to make the school a better and more beautiful place to be.
The inspiration for my painting is from the past and the present.
I have Always liked Linnaeus and what he did and now we have Greta. A true hero. I have read that she is related to one of Linnaeus’ disciples.
On the painting I have two quotes. One is the sign that Greta used in Sweden when she started her school strike for the climate action, she sat every Friday outside the Swedish parliament. The Linnaeus quote is about ‘If a tree dies then plant a new one.’ And it´s so true.
And if Linnaeus put it all together then Greta is trying to keep everything together and that is the link I want to show everybody with my portrait.”
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For further information about the competition, or any of our other programmes, email learning@linnean.org