Derek is a classically trained painter who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, but he has evolved his style over the years and added a huge range of strings to his creative bow. As well as his striking large-scale oil paintings and watercolours, he’s a master of everything from performance art to film-making and large interactive sculpture. He also founded the Museum of Optography, a project that plays with the process of retrieving the last image from a person’s retina at the moment of their death.

The prize in our fab artistic reader treat is called Orange Femur and Sea – it’s from a series of works that mark the transition from Derek’s Lockdown Series of paintings to the Blue Series, completed in 2023.

Its sense of being underwater harks back to the first painting he ever sold, called Diving for Pearls, and it expresses the artist’s joy at embracing the blue. It depicts a huge moving body of sea, touched with a zing of complementary orange, and summons a surreal and transitory world beneath the waves, populated by dancing froth and strange pitch-black creatures.

We could look at it for hours – but this artwork is destined for a reader’s home (sob). For a chance to win, simply answer the competition question below – if you didn’t spot the answer above, you can find the answer on Derek’s webpage too.