What makes a good portrait?
There’s a view that portraiture is all about getting a good likeness.
In fact, when it comes to producing a successful portrait the
painter’s core priorities — control of colour, tone and
composition — remain the tests of success.
Not that a likeness is unimportant. It’s crucial of course. But a portrait can’t be a good portrait without first being a good painting. Fall at that first hurdle and no matter how painstakingly accurate the transcription of the features, the portrait will fail.
What’s my approach?
First, tradition is important: only a fool would turn their back
on the accumulated experience of what’s gone before. There’s a
particularly strong portrait tradition in Britain, and I’m always
looking to learn new lessons from how previous generations have
approached their job. Harnessed to tradition, and equally important, is the need to remain open to
what’s new. I’ve always enjoyed using technology, and in constructing
my pictures I make heavy use of digital cameras and computers —
two tools that open up a world of new possibilities for the artist.
Since 2004 I’ve been working to build up a practice as a professional portrait painter. I’ve taken a scenic route to get to this point. I have degrees in economics and international politics from the Universities of Manchester and Oxford. I’ve worked in London’s policy thinktanks, in the British Parliament, and in the European Commission in Brussels. I’ve also worked as a web programmer and designer, and as a consultant for a multinational IT business. I now paint full time, taking portrait commissions from across the UK and also internationally. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.
Thanks for visiting. Do take a look around. And don’t hesitate to
Most of a portrait painter’s output will tend to be pictures of individual sitters. In my view there’s one overriding goal: to produce something that has strength and integrity as an image. On this fundamental hook I hang the incidental aspects that will make a portrait engaging and personal. The mood, expression and bearing of the sitter, together with symbols and meaningful details from the sitter’s life, can, with luck and preparation, be brought together in a coherent whole.
From a series of paintings, 2008-2009:
![Triple Portrait [With my Parents]](../images/medium/PaintTriplePortrait.jpg)
By contrast with individual portraits, where the main interaction is between the sitter and the artist or viewer, group portraits inform the viewer about the relationships between the people in the picture.
This added layer of complexity requires thoughtful handling.
"The West Family" are directly engaged with one another. I try to reinforce this using eyelines and hands. While I was working on this picture I took to calling it the ‘Holy Family’, and this is my (wholly secular) attempt to get across something of the sense of harmony you sometimes get from treatments of that subject.
In "Triple Portrait (With My Parents)" there’s no eye contact. Everyone is immersed in their own immediate world. But the arrangement of the figures is intended to convey comfort with one another - the uncomplicated sharing of common space.
Self-portraits aren’t commissions.
An obvious statement, which points towards what makes them interesting.
When you’re the client, with only yourself to please, space opens up to
try out new techniques and unfamiliar approaches.
This section contains the following self-portraits:
The pictures in this section aren’t finished paintings. Rather, they’re more cursory attempts to capture light or colour, composition or likeness. Some of them were then used as source material for more finished work.
Many of them come from the course I take at Heatherleys. Models sit for our Heatherleys group in six-day or nine-day setups. We’re encouraged to do what we can, always from life, with the time available.
This section contains the following studies and sketches:
This website adjusts the size of the images it shows you in the gallery, according to the size of your computer screen. Here’s a page of direct links to large-size images of all the paintings.
In the track above I've used parts of “London Town” by Light of the World and “Maiden Voyage” by Bobby Hutcherson, along with other bits and bobs.
How it relates to the painting will all become clear. It's a bit of a departure from the portraiture. I'll be posting photos and more when it's finally done.
Recently, two songs from Marvin Gaye's classic “What’s Going On” leaked onto torrent sites as complete multitracks. Each element of the song could now be heard separately, sounding as it did when it was first fed into the mixing desk. I used the bits, together with the finished tracks, to make an edit of the album.
I provided the animation, using Photoshop, After Effects, Audition and Mixmeister for the beatmatching.
There are more paintings coming.
In the meantime, I always liked Merry Clayton’s version of Gimme Shelter. She sang backing vocals alongside Mick Jagger on the ‘Let It Bleed’ album, and recorded her own cover version a year later (as heard on YouTube). But the intro always left you thinking “Where’s the Keef?”As a contrast here's the same song sung by Michael Hedges. Someone filmed him as he played in front of a university crowd in America somewhere, and then uploaded the footage to YouTube. I've cleaned up the audio from it as best I can:
Finally — I have one more track with a different sound.
Direct downloads (right-click, save target as):
A few years ago I got interested in the problem of how to show art online. Could it be done in a distinctive and eyecatching way? I fixed on the idea of building a gallery that users could explore by themselves. They could walk around and look at the paintings, all in a way that mimicked a real-world space.
Sites such as YouTube used Flash for the same reason. That's now changing, of course. As one of his last acts on earth, Steve Jobs used the power that came with the success of the iPad to stick the knife into Flash. As a consequence in this mobile-focused version of the site I've opted for opensource HTML5 to play video and audio instead.
For more complex interactions, however, Flash is still very useful. But it doesn’t come with a 3D engine inside it. If you want 3D, you have to write the computer code to make it work yourself...
...Which is what I set out to do. My solution keeps things as simple as possible. Imagine the gallery space, seen from above, flattened into a map drawn on squared paper. The walls and the paintings all have a fixed position. The viewer, who can move around inside the space, is represented by three numbers. The first two are a pair of coordinates giving the position of the viewer on the flattened map; the third is an angle showing what direction the viewer is facing.
The 3D illusion in the image above is generated by dividing the scene from left to right into vertical strips. For each of those strips, I find the distance to the nearest wall using some straightforward trigonometry. On each strip the height of the wall (and the height of any painting that’s hung on it) corresponds to the distance between the wall and the viewer, following the rules of perspective.
Essentially, a lot of calculation is going on in the background to answer a simple question: how far away is the wall? By updating the answer several times a second, the walls can be drawn and redrawn as the viewer moves around the gallery.
[update: this approach addressed the limitations of Flash at the time. More recent versions allow you to skew images directly (using something called matrix transformation, which was given a major upgrade from Flash version 10). It means my approach, at least as far as the vertical strips are concerned, is solving a problem that no longer exists. I've kept the demo up here because there's other bits of it that I think work very nicely, but I won't be building a final version using this code.]
In April of 2007 I made a self-portrait. I took photographs throughout the process, and then put together this video which shows the evolution of the picture over time.
My review of the portraiture exhibition shown at the Royal Academy in London during the spring of 2007.
Carmen is the owner of the Cartuja de Cazalla, an ancient carthusian monastery in southern Spain. Over the past thirty years she has overseen its transformation from an abandoned ruin into a thriving cultural centre and tourist business.
The portrait was commissioned by a group of Carmen’s friends and supporters. It’s an international group, and inevitably some of them couldn’t be present at the Cartuja for the grand unveiling in the monastery’s central chapel. Wanting both to thank them and to include them in the event, I put together a web page presenting the portrait and telling the story of Carmen and the Cartuja. For a time it was hosted on the Cartuja's website. (It's not there now. Instead the whole site was replaced by a Flash-only effort, which may not be the greatest idea.)
