PAINTING on concrete, rather than canvas, was the extra attention to authenticity that helped Yorkshire artist Mandy Payne win the £10,000 main prize in the biennial New Light exhibition for contemporary artists, which is showing for the first time at the Bowes Museum.

She entered three studies of the same inner city apartment block from different viewpoints, finding beauty in bleakness with a satisfying geometry of form as conceived, perhaps, by architects before stinking stairwells and mould-ridden rooms became the grim reality for those transplanted there from slum clearance back-to-backs in the mid-20th century.

Payne won the Valeria Sykes award for Broken Brutalism, with companion pieces Betwixt and Between and Regeneration, all conveyed through the graffiti-inspired use of industrial spray paint as well as oils.

With their slightly soft-edge quality – due perhaps to the concrete panel base – they are comparatively small and, ranged vertically on the wall, easy to overlook, especially if there’s a throng in the gallery, beside the much larger eye-catching atmospheric study by Easingwold artist Debbie Loane depicting Dunstanburgh Castle in a February storm on canvas, grainy and sparkling in monochrome, with a blazing sea and rain-lashed rocks.

The contrast between this expressive landscape and Payne’s representational urban scene makes the latter all the more potent, rendered through subtle gradations of colour and strong lines.

Her cool scrutiny of buildings absent of human figures may be in essence as romantic as Loane’s exuberance for the wildly dramatic, but both cast light on a particular location.

New Light was set up initially to promote technical skills among emerging artists in the North and now includes all artists with a connection to the historic northern counties.

The skills are traditional ones of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking – there is no video or installation art, though a work by Lottie Alexander using thousands of Swarovski crystals for deer skull with antlers may owe something to Damien Hirst.

Virtuosity in oils is found in Josephine by Joshua Waterhouse, which won the £2,500 Patron's Choice Award. Combining modernity with classical realism, it depicts a young woman draped in satin holding an embossed pewter jug. Flesh, cloth, metallic sheen and inlaid box are rendered with something akin to an enamel finish, no brushstrokes visible, not unlike paintings by Ingres.

The judges' selection of 84 works by 61 artists includes a good selection of prints in various techniques. Emma Lawrence's delicate abstract screen print, Stone Pen – blocks of grey, yellow and off-white – won the Zillah Bell Printmaker's Prize. The Swinton Foundation Award for emerging artists went to Anna Poulton for a stylised drawing of angular Figs.

Notable for topicality as well as technique is Steel Making, Redcar, a gash of white amid dusky browns in an etching by David Morris. Anja Percival, of Durham, captures the dying of the light in two shadowy Sun Light etchings on copper.

Hester Cox, who lived for many years at Masham, is showing a collagraph, Tracks and Traces, which combines three ways of seeing and experiencing a specific landscape.

Others from the D&S Times area include Sarah Garsfield, born in Darlington, now living at Ramsgill, with a rocky seascape on the Beara Peninsula in oils, and Richmond artist Richard Thursfield, who is showing a regimented row of twigs, tree trunks and plant stems described with botanical accuracy in pencil, watercolour and acrylics.

Maxwell Doig's full length studies of a boy and girl in profile and the crumbling masonry of a gable end are examples of almost photographic painterliness. Anne Desmet's Brooklyn Bridge etchings are remarkably detailed. Strong portraits include one by Steven Lawler of an elderly man whose eyes seem to see only the past. Jo Taylor's Phantom Heads reward patient scrutiny.

The exhibition is at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle until February 7 and then tours to the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate, after which a selection of works will travel to the Panter and Hall Gallery in London in June.

Pru Farrier