sky arts : portrait artist of the week

Sky Arts are in their third week of bringing Portrait Artist of the Year to a new weekly lockdown format into everyone’s homes, enabling thousands of people to spend four hours on a Sunday connecting with a past winner of the programme, and join in with the portrait painting process. I have had varying degrees of success over the past three weeks, and this weeks attempt, painting the photographer Rankin, was starting to look like a frustrating and wasted four hours on a painting rollercoaster, as getting any similarity to the sitter was looking more and more unlikely.

For me, there is a high level of emotional buy-in on every painting and when things are not going well it really is quite demoralising. You can tell yourself to view it as a learning process, adopt a growth mindset, learn from your mistakes etc etc but at the end of it, if you have a s**t piece of work in front of you, it is really quite hard to be upbeat.

There is such a fine balance between taking risks and ruining something. But in some ways, when a painting is looking so far from something you would ever have any pride in, then it is quite easy to take the risks. If things are all going swimmingly then it is really hard to push yourself to do something a bit different, maybe a bit more radical, and it is all too easy to fall back into your own safety zone.

So, it was in the end a good thing that hours 2, 3 and 4 of the four hour sitting went atrociously, as it was only at that point that I decided to get the white emulsion and the kettle out. To cover the painting in a thick glutinous layer of household white paint, watch it dry (literally watch it dry) and then pick the perfect moment to pour boiling water over it to pull the paint off again and see what is revealed and decide what remains hidden.

This is a process I use over and over again in my landscapes, but it had never occurred to me to use it in this context (doh!). An experiment in allowing the paint to make the decisions.

I have never in my life known what a painting will look like when I start it. I have an idea of where I will start but no clue where I will end up, or what routes I will take to get there. I allow the process of painting to be the key element. It kind of takes it out of my hands a bit. I just make the decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. Until I get to a point where I can sit back and say ‘yep, that’s finished’ (knowing when you reach that point is a whole other minefield).

Which makes portrait painting a bit tricky as there has to be an end result that bears some resemblance to the sitter. Ultimately, after my white emulsion paddy attack, I am really liking this painting. Not so much the portrait or the likeness, but the effect of the paint on the canvas. It was just a bit of a painful process to get there. And it doesn’t look like Rankin…you might have to leave that with me.

Steps 1 to 7965 of this painting, The images of the missing steps will never be seen, that’s where it all was going wrong.
From initial sketches to getting paint onto canvas to that last stage of obliterating and revealing, and making the decision at that point to leave it be.

For more images of the #PAOTW event, and for others portrait results head over to Instagram.

Enjoy!