Latest news with #portraiture
CBC
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Canada's national portraiture prize is looking to gain mass appeal for its 2025 edition
Jason Donville was a fan of the Kingston Prize — Canada's national portraiture prize — long before he took over as the chair of its board. The former Canadian naval officer-turned-hedge fund manager had always been interested in art. Figurative art in particular "just really got to me," he says. Initially, he was drawn to the prize as a way of scouting out new Canadian artists. "As somebody who wanted to put figurative painting on the wall was how I originally got involved with it," he says. "I was using it as a way to say, 'How do I discover new painters that I've never heard of before?' And every two years, the list of 30 [nominees] was fabulous, and there are several paintings that have been on my walls for 20 years that came from me looking at the website of the Kingston Prize." The Kingston Prize was founded in 2005 by Queen's University professor Julian Brown and his wife, Kaaren. The Kingston has been awarded every other year since then (except in 2021, when it was skipped due to COVID). It was inspired by the Archibald Prize, the national portraiture prize in Brown's native Australia, which has been running since 1921. "They started up themselves from scratch and kind of begged, borrowed and whatever to get it going," Donville says of the Browns. By 2023, though, the prize had begun to "run out of steam," says Donville, as the Browns and the rest of their cohort aged. He asked what he could do to help. "And before you know it, I became the chairman of the Kingston Prize." His goal as chairman, he says, is to make the prize a bigger deal in the Canadian consciousness. The Kingston Prize may be well-known in art circles, but in Australia, the Archibald has crossover appeal to people who aren't necessarily art aficionados. The Kingston Prize has just over 1,300 followers on Instagram, the Archibald has 11,700. Donville says there's no reason the Kingston Prize couldn't have the same mass appeal. "The general public tends to really love [portrait prizes] because it's faces," he says. "It's the faces of a nation." In March, the prize released its first-ever book, a 20-year retrospective, as part of that effort to get in front of more people. One of the artists featured was 2023's winner, Shaun Downey. Downey is familiar with the world of portrait awards. In 2010, he was accepted into the United Kingdom's national portrait award — then called the BP Portrait Award — where his work was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. "They put my work on posters in the subway," he says. "It was on a huge banner on the front of the National Portrait Gallery.... And I really got my career sort of kicked into high gear. So I knew the possibility of that in Canada would be great." He submitted work for the 2015, 2017 and 2019 Kingston Prizes — earning an honourable mention in 2017 — before his eventual win in 2023. He says his work isn't necessarily what people imagine when they think of portraits. "I've often done portrait commissions where people say, 'I don't want it to be like a grandmother-over-the-fireplace-style portrait,'" he says. "So they've allowed me to add narrative elements, do something not quite so head and shoulders, sort of putting them more into a scene." Jim Bravo was a 2023 honourable mention and is also featured in the book. In addition to being a portrait artist, he's also a muralist, and he says he likes to keep working at scale when doing portraits, too. Most of his works are life-sized or close to it. But he's also influenced by photojournalism, and views portraits as a way of not only capturing people's likenesses, but their lives. His 2023 submission showed his mother and grandmother working at home as seamstresses. "She would go to work at, basically, a sweatshop in Chinatown during the day," he says. "Then, when she'd come home, she would be picking up orders … for her own little business. That really captures a moment in time back then for me in Toronto. That's my family, but [it] could have portrayed any number of my friends' parents that were doing the same thing.… We all came over as immigrants in the mid '70s and there's a lot of similar stories of that nature." For Donville, beyond its artistic value, the Kingston Prize is yet another way of defining Canadian identity, showing us who we are as a people and talking about the things that affect our everyday lives. "The country is continuously in evolution," he says. "And the mix of the population is in evolution. So the paintings are, in a sense, a reflection of us."
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A rarefied world of privilege': lives of the New England upper class
In the late 1970s, Tina Barney began a decades-long exploration of the (often hidden) life of the New England upper class, to which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the US east coast Developing her portraiture further in the 1980s, she began directing her subjects, giving an intimate scale to large-format photographs Tina Barney: 'This was a very early photo and I had just begun working with a 4x5 view camera. I used the available tungsten lighting so the exposure was long, and therefore my mother had to hold still for a couple of seconds. The table setting was typical for her to create since she was an interior decorator and she enjoyed the process' 'There's so much action going on at this moment since the setting was my sister's wedding reception. I had a flash on top of my Toyo 4x5 camera and it caught so many terrific details. The flowers going through my sister's head, her hands that mimic the little angel behind her dressed in gold, the angel's halo looking like my sister's hat, and on and on …' These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie – a landscape of hidden tension found in micro-expressions and in what Barney calls the subtle gestures of 'disruption' that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux Tina Barney says: 'This photograph was very different for me. I usually didn't make such minimalistic compositions plus I rarely made verticals. At this time I was influenced by Thomas Ruff's giant vertical heads. Having two heads however was more difficult to photograph since I had to struggle with the focus and I was using an 8x10 camera which is not an easy task' Family Ties collects 60 large-format portraits from the three decades that defined Barney's career The images highlight the artist's approach to large-format photography, her ongoing interest in the rituals of families, and her own ideas of composition, colour and the complex relationship between photography and painting Tina Barney: 'The gaze is the most powerful detail in this photograph. That gaze defines the entire spirit of a human being, exits through the eyes and is perceived by the viewer therefore holding our attention. The grace and composure of this young girl is hard to find as a photographer' Tina Barney: 'I was photographing a family in Barcelona when I realised one of the family members was downstairs having their bust sculpted in clay. What is curious is that the white lamp in that space interested me more than anything else. Its graphic white form stood out against the green leather door' 'The more stuff in a space or a room for me, the easier it is. The more minimalistic a space is, the more difficult, because then you have to work harder. You've got to think about that figure and what to do with it' Tina Barney did not idealise. Her subjects appear to us in the complete banality of their daily lives
The Guardian
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘So much emotion in a single image': I join a schoolclass admiring Jenny Saville's astonishing new portraits
I went to see Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery recently and the exhibition was swarming with teenagers. Equipped with notepads and sketchbooks, scribbling down words like 'expressive', 'daring' and 'beautiful', the budding art enthusiasts seemed enraptured by Saville's portraits: from blemished backs and wounded faces to colossal closeups of girls and fleshy nude women. I got talking to an art teacher and her sixth formers and we discussed how Saville's bodies are the antithesis to the idealised forms we see online today; and how stunned we were by the landscape of textures that can exist within a single cheek. Seventeen-year-old Laurence – who makes drawings with a ballpoint pen – admired the 'messy side' to Saville's work and was fascinated by 'just how much emotion she could portray in one image'. His classmate Georgia, also 17, was drawn to her 'vibrant colours' and felt 'positively overwhelmed' by the paintings, in particular Propped, an exposing early self-portrait that was part of the artist's Glasgow School of Art degree show. Fusing beauty and brutality, a softness and sharpness, a nude Saville sits on a precarious-looking stool (spikily jamming into her ankle), with bitten-down nails that violently claw into her skin. Look closer and you'll see the painting is overlaid with text (written backwards) that reads: 'if we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other'. It's a translation from the French feminist Luce Irigaray's 1980 essay When Our Lips Speak Together, and draws not only on the importance of art history not repeating itself (by excluding voices and subjects), but – more powerfully today – about the failings of current leaders. 'It's really inspiring for young women in art to be controversial,' Georgia said. 'It also makes you more confident in your ability and appearance, because you see Saville create it in a beautiful painting.' Frustrated at how 'inaccessible' being an artist has been for women in history, and questioning why men get to be covered up with a fig leaf, whereas women are often fully exposed, she said: 'When [a self-portrait like this] is done by a woman, it's empowering in itself – it's women taking back control.' Georgia's words took me back to my own experiences as a teenager with Saville, who I studied as part of my GCSEs in the early 2010s. I remember my classmates and I coming into school with printouts of our faces pressed up against glass windows (no doubt reluctantly taken by our mums) that distorted our features like Saville's 2002 Closed Contact self-portraits, made with photographer Glen Luchford. Full of expression, and evocative of our teenage angst, the works got us thinking about how portraiture, like our lives, could be messy, fractured, emotional, internal – seemingly worlds away from the gilt-framed pictures that we often saw in museums, or the airbrushed photoshoots in magazines. But only now, at this show, have I been able to understand the monumental impact of her paintings. Not only in challenging notions of beauty in a patriarchal world, but in her ambition to push paint – and charcoal, in her mesmerising drawings – to new limits, in order to viscerally confront, stun and challenge. Whether it be a bloodied face examined under a bright white light, bodies fading from life right in front of us, or her truthful insights on motherhood, Saville's works hold the attention in ways that affirm the power of painting in a world overtaken by mindless scrolling. It was this that I also discussed with the teenagers, whose astute observations made me feel so encouraged about what art can offer us, in this tumultuous world. But these precious youthful discussions could become a rarity, thanks to ever decreasing government funding in arts education. As outlined in the recent spending review, the total expenditure of Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be reduced by 1.4% over the next three years, and research shows that only 38% of A-level students are taking at least one humanities subject (a statistic that drops to 24% when it comes to arts subjects). As a result, we are experiencing a crisis when it comes to lack of opportunities for creatives from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Incredibly, Saville's exhibition is free for anyone aged 25 and under, thanks to a private donor. I hope this will encourage young people of all backgrounds to enter these spaces and feel welcome to discuss, debate and come back again – and to understand the raw, visceral power that painting and the arts can have.
The National
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
'It's not just a big selfie': Inside the unexpected revival of old-school painted portraits
It was, concedes Claudia Fisher, a lot of money to spend. 'I'd never spent that kind of money on something before,' says the American creative director of women's tailoring brand Belle Brummell. 'But I have something unique that gives me a lot of joy, and I have supported the art form and that's important.' Indeed, Fisher's Dh98,000 outlay went to having her portrait painted by celebrated portraitist Paul Brason, who counts leading industrialists, academics and the British royal family's late Prince Philip among his subjects. 'I just loved the way he could render fabric so exquisitely, giving his paintings an old master quality, even if the painting now just hangs in my house,' says Fisher. 'It's fun to say 'hi' to it once in a while.' Fisher is not alone. Both the Portrait Society of America and the UK's Royal Society of Portrait Painters – the two most august institutions of portrait painting, which not only promote portraiture, but also operate commissioning services that connect artists and subjects – report healthy demand. If one might worry that the smartphone age – which has made the constant taking of pictures almost compulsive – would kill off portrait painting, it seems the reverse is the case. 'Portraiture is quite a big business within the art world, really, even if it is often portrayed as being rather traditional, in the sense of being concerned with old ideas of beauty in art,' says Anthony Connolly, president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. 'And while a lot of institutions still commission portraits – the church, military, academia, corporations, heads of state and so on – portraiture is changing dramatically from the idea that it's an elitist thing to do. Now, it's more just a culture of people painting people.' Connolly argues that while a portrait is definitely a luxury item, for a one-off work by a highly skilled individual, and for something that will last generations, it can nonetheless represent very good value, 'especially if you put it in the context of another bespoke item, the likes of a Savile Row suit '. Besides, portrait painters run the gamut as much in their price – from as little as Dh2,000 to much, much more – as they do in their style. Dubai artist Suzi Nassif, for example, creates portraits in surrealistic, sometimes cubist styles, with her subjects expressed more through unexpected colours and symbolism than an accurate likeness. 'They're imaginative portraits, more as I see them and not necessarily as the subjects might see themselves,' says Nassif, who, once she has got to know her subject, prefers to then work from memory. 'The power of the portrait is to examine the psyche behind the mask, and to do that I think it makes sense to use all the creative tools available to the painter.' Certainly, while for an artist who prefers to work in person, a portrait might require the sitter to give perhaps two to three hours of their time, maybe four or five times over several months, it's also increasingly commonplace for artists to work in part or entirely from photographs. For example, artist Columbus Onuoha, who also lives in Dubai, is recognised for his photorealistic portraits in oil paint. Digital photography actually helps him zoom in on the precise details that make his portraits so arresting. It also allows him to tackle the work as inspiration strikes rather than be beholden to the sitter's schedule. Far from being put off by having their image rendered in exquisitely unforgiving detail, 'clients love the honesty of the results, the transparency', reckons Onuoha. 'Though, occasionally, people of a certain age want to be represented as a little younger than they are. But a portrait should be a record of a time of life. I tell my subjects to be proud of the age they are, though I sometimes do a self-portrait to remind myself how it feels.' And how does being intimately examined, and then represented in paint, feel? Connolly, who is currently having his own portrait painted, suggests that far from being a discomforting experience 'it's very convivial, intimate without being salacious and almost like a kind of meditation. You feel like you're part of the painting process even though, of course, you're not painting the portrait.' Yet surely just having a photograph taken – even one by a professional – is faster and simpler? Yes, Onuoha agrees, but that is to miss the point of why people want to be painted. He argues that, while social media has certainly helped him to build a career, it's the very ubiquity of digital images – and the way they have democratised portraiture – that encourages many of his clients to want 'something that's handmade, tangible, and that puts them at the centre of an artistic process', he says. 'These people also tend to love art. They want to be involved.' But others go further, arguing that a painted portrait simply catches what a photograph never can. As Christine Egnoski, chief executive of the Portrait Society of America, suggests, it reveals the qualities of a person unseen by a snap, 'offering the viewer a more real sense of the person's presence, as well as the artist's own expression. An artist adds the feeling of the person.' It explains why, she argues, 10 million people queue to look at the Mona Lisa each year, and the enduring appeal of the portrait in art, both before and since the advent of photography. Frances Bell, portrait painter and recent winner of the Portrait Society of America's prestigious Draper Grand Prize, puts it another way. 'A painted portrait has something of the thrum of life about it, something transcendent – there's so much life on the canvas that it can feel like a window on another, sometimes historic world,' she says. 'The artist is trying to work out who that person is – their mannerisms, how they hold themselves and so on – so the result understands something deeper than a photo can. It's not just a big selfie, but is very personal, which is why it's very important that a sitter pick the right painter for them.' It's also why, she suggests, people so often turn to this special means of representing someone not out of vanity, but to mark a special moment in their life – an important anniversary, for example, or, as more than one of Bell's clients have done, to celebrate getting over a major illness. And why, so often, it's not the sitter who commissions the portrait for themselves, but a partner or family member. Sure, the result may never be hung in a gallery or a museum, but what better way to celebrate and immortalise an individual life than in paint?
BBC News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Documentary Podcast Amoako Boafo: Creating space to celebrate Blackness
The Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo has attracted global fame for his bold and sensual portraits. He paints bodies and faces using his fingertips instead of a brush, capturing form through direct, tactile gestures. When he went to art school in Vienna, he was struck by the extent to which Black subjects had been overlooked in global art. Determined to change the status quo, he drew inspiration from early 20th Century Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and added his own techniques to invent a fresh new style of portraiture. Lucy Ash follows his preparations for a major new show at Gagosian in London. It involves a transformation of the gallery space into a full-scale recreation of a Ghanaian courtyard – just like the shared space in which he was raised. With the help of his collaborator, Glenn De Roché, an architect famous for community buildings and with an artist friend who produced a set of playing cards, especially for the event. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world's most creative people.
