BP Portrait Award

Excellent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to mark this year’s BP Portrait Award.

There were no silly works in this year’s show such as abstract portraits. Apart from one picture, I think you would have recognized any of the people if they had walked past you in the street, which is surely one point of a portrait.

Looking at the notes I made as I went round they are copious so it’s really hard to pick out pictures I particularly liked as I noted down so many. I thought Edward Sutcliffe and Li Wu Da’s picture of an art forger was clever, combining a straight portrait by Sutcliffe with a 90 degree elongated mirror image by Da. A nice play on the idea of copying and transforming images. I liked “Andrea and Myrtle” by Simon Davis but no-one is painting me on the toilet!

There seemed to be a number of works in egg tempera such as “Profile of Emily” by Anthony Williams which had a very real effect but was made up an lots of tiny lines in different colours, almost pointillist.

I think my favourite was “Henrietta and Ollie” by Tom Hall which showed his partner who is also a portraitist painting a picture and including a wonderful pug dog you just wanted to pat. She also had a work in the show showing the chef James Martin.

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