The pleasures of portraits

"Inner Dialogue" by Jamie Routley

(by kind permission of the artist)

I had to go to London the other day, and had arranged to meet a friend for lunch at the National Portrait Gallery restaurant - handy for Charing Cross, where the train arrives.  Arriving a little ahead of time, I visited  the BP Portrait Award exhibition, which was a total delight.  

Portraits don't really lend themselves to some of the excesses of contemporary art.  Picasso probably bent the genre as much as he could, with dislocated body parts, but you could still see, more or less, that it was a picture of a human figure.  The BP portraits are largely figurative, though there's the odd gimmick - Agnes Toth's painting of Drummond Money-Coutts, the Magician, for example, is a triple portrait, three-quarter face, full face and profile, while Daniel Coves has his sitter with her back to the artist in Net No. 10.  I found  some of the "straight" portraits very powerful - the prizewinning Das Berliner Zimmer, for example, by Owen Normand, or Mark Fairnington's hyperrealistic The Rose and the Bee.

The pleasure of portraits lies in the painter's ability to get under the sitter's skin.  At their best (Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family, for example) they have a way of revealing more about the sitter than is entirely comfortable.  It's that combination of detachment and intimacy that makes portraits irresistible, whatever the technique.

Self-portaits - of which there are a number in the exhibition - take the process in a different direction.  None of us really knows who we are.  Our identity is a muddle of preconceptions and suppressions. The artist's painting of himself, consequently, engenders questioning and uncertainty.  The intimacy of an ordinary portrait is compounded by the onlooker's intrusion on a dialogue between the artist and his image of himself.  For this reason I particularly liked Jamie Routley's Inner Dialogue, where the artist appears to be looking back at the spectator but is in fact looking into a mirror opposite another mirror, so that there is an infinite series of reflections.  The personal props - books, ornaments, the butterfly as an image of an instant of time captured,  and the hourglass as an image of time passing - contribute further to the feelings of intimacy and intrusion.     

Hurry along and see it.  Oh, and lunch on the 3rd floor was good too.

Antony Mair   

National Portrait Gallery - north front