BP Portrait Awards
This annual exhibition and award at the National Portrait Gallery aims to promote the very best in contemporary portrait painting. This year it has been opened to all artists abolishing the upper age limit but introducing an extra prize for artists aged between 18 and 30.
Although each picture is decided on merit, inevitably each year themes do seem to appear. This year seemed to have a good selection of pictures focusing on age. The winner “Michael Simpson” by Paul Emsley is a large portrait of an older man, in fact an artist from him home town. It is so big and so finely painted that every crevice in the face is visible and the whole face seems to look out of the black background towards you. Another picture entitles “Bevan Boy” showed the artist, Philip Renforth’s, father who had been a Bevan Boy in the war. He now had a face of great dignity.
Another theme seemed to be paintings of not just anonymous sitters but sitters who were not actually know by the painter. “Commuter” by John Ball was based on mobile phone photos of a fellow commuter while “Only for a fiver” by Edward Sutcliffe, shows a man who the artist met on Tottenham Court Road and paid a fiver for a short sitting and some photographs.
The weakest picture was a strange abstract picture called “Time to talk” by Lynn Aherns. It was very abstract for a portrait and I felt it possibly needed a photo of the subject to give you an idea whether the essence of the person had been captured by the picture.
My favourite was “Father and sons” by Anthony Williams which with fine brush strokes giving texture shows three men with the same genetic face. Through the windows are a red brick townscape.
Reviews
Times
Guardian
Although each picture is decided on merit, inevitably each year themes do seem to appear. This year seemed to have a good selection of pictures focusing on age. The winner “Michael Simpson” by Paul Emsley is a large portrait of an older man, in fact an artist from him home town. It is so big and so finely painted that every crevice in the face is visible and the whole face seems to look out of the black background towards you. Another picture entitles “Bevan Boy” showed the artist, Philip Renforth’s, father who had been a Bevan Boy in the war. He now had a face of great dignity.
Another theme seemed to be paintings of not just anonymous sitters but sitters who were not actually know by the painter. “Commuter” by John Ball was based on mobile phone photos of a fellow commuter while “Only for a fiver” by Edward Sutcliffe, shows a man who the artist met on Tottenham Court Road and paid a fiver for a short sitting and some photographs.
The weakest picture was a strange abstract picture called “Time to talk” by Lynn Aherns. It was very abstract for a portrait and I felt it possibly needed a photo of the subject to give you an idea whether the essence of the person had been captured by the picture.
My favourite was “Father and sons” by Anthony Williams which with fine brush strokes giving texture shows three men with the same genetic face. Through the windows are a red brick townscape.
Reviews
Times
Guardian
Comments