Blog
Heads of Famous People
06/11/2022
While I’m painting, a famous person will sometimes hover around inside my head - maybe someone I’ve been thinking about, reading or listening to. I put them into the work near the end of the making as the fun flourish. These aren’t portraits as such, though I use a downloaded photo (chosen with care, I now realise), they are more like markers, nods, waves of my hand. They come to my mind with their own visual objects, like the attributes of saints. Really they are more the spirit of the painting than the subject.
Stravinsky; marking that I have loved Russian composers since getting The Rites of Spring in my teens.
Benjamin Britten: the tweed, the reeds on the marshes, beloved Peter and the Wolf with Ustinov
Shirley Williams: she really meant it. She was a Fabian Old Labour intellectual with a gentle voice - but tough.
Mark Morris; I heard this American choreographer on ‘Private Passions’, a favourite Radio 3 programme, and got a beautiful John Adams symphony from him.
Matthew Parris: he’s himself, urbane, independent-minded, brainy.
I painted a set of Johnson, Sunak, Hancock, Patel and Rees-Mogg but came to dislike seeing them in my studio.
It amuses me to not properly engage with portraiture in an artist-subject way, by studying the character or even the features of a sitter - artists are meant to be psychologically perceptive and I don’t care about that. Maybe ‘muse’ is a better description of what’s going on in my creative process, but in the sense of vaguley thinking, not Pygmalion-style inspiration.
I never feel alone in the studio; people of every kind, mostly dead, hover around like angels in a medieval heaven. Painting a remote celebrity who would have no interest in meeting me in my remote Norfolk field seems slightly comical and pathetic. It is also an act of power - I could do whatever I like wiith their images. The paintings are neither cariacatures nor fantasies, more a mark that the6 have been, for a time on my mind.
Stravinsky; marking that I have loved Russian composers since getting The Rites of Spring in my teens.
Benjamin Britten: the tweed, the reeds on the marshes, beloved Peter and the Wolf with Ustinov
Shirley Williams: she really meant it. She was a Fabian Old Labour intellectual with a gentle voice - but tough.
Mark Morris; I heard this American choreographer on ‘Private Passions’, a favourite Radio 3 programme, and got a beautiful John Adams symphony from him.
Matthew Parris: he’s himself, urbane, independent-minded, brainy.
I painted a set of Johnson, Sunak, Hancock, Patel and Rees-Mogg but came to dislike seeing them in my studio.
It amuses me to not properly engage with portraiture in an artist-subject way, by studying the character or even the features of a sitter - artists are meant to be psychologically perceptive and I don’t care about that. Maybe ‘muse’ is a better description of what’s going on in my creative process, but in the sense of vaguley thinking, not Pygmalion-style inspiration.
I never feel alone in the studio; people of every kind, mostly dead, hover around like angels in a medieval heaven. Painting a remote celebrity who would have no interest in meeting me in my remote Norfolk field seems slightly comical and pathetic. It is also an act of power - I could do whatever I like wiith their images. The paintings are neither cariacatures nor fantasies, more a mark that the6 have been, for a time on my mind.
