British portraiture

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

This is a great topic seeing as though the BP Portrait Award is coming soon.

Being a British born artist myself, although educated in South Africa (with, in fact, a very modern British outlook), I feel an affinity with the non-traditional methods of British portraiture. Not all, however. Some of it, I find, is too obviously weird, putting itself too self-consciously into the post-modernist trends, and ending up looking like a still from a first-person-shoot-up-computer game.

I do, however, appreciate the frankness of a Freud or a Spencer: artists from an earlier era. I think that the idea behind the recent portrait of the Queen by Freud is an honest one, but I do feel that there is a distaste for the subject, perhaps, and for the tradition of royal or aristocratic portrait painting. I think there is a lot of disgruntled feeling about the class system in the UK, and the dismissal of the working classes in the past has influenced, consciously or not, artists whose families are or were of that class, and subsequently an anti-romantic, anti-idealist feeling filters through into their paintings. But also post -war feelings have crept in too - a sense of futility, depression, disappointment. Although these have metamorphosized into port-modern ideas of championing the sidelined people, places, ideas.

Zorn, Sargent etc. are Victorian painters and Freud, Spencer are 20th century painters. So there is a difference because of the time they lived - more so, perhaps, than their country of origin. The British Victorian Pre-Raphaelites have much the same sentiments as Zorn and Sargent. What about Edward Hopper? A early 20th Century American with a bleak outlook similar to Freud. But there is a difference there that is national, I think. The each portray a way of life particularly American and British, respectively.

My own personal response to this is to paint whatever inspires me each time I feel the urge to paint. Just having finished a very British-looking portrait for the BP Portrait Award competition, I feel a real need to paint something really chocolate-boxy - to put it frankly. Each is a valid human attraction because the need to do it, the liking of each style cannot be helped. The thing to do is to see what may be regarded as weaknesses by your peers and mentors as something involutarily and proudly yours. The trick is to acknowledge that part of yourself, and to use it to your advantage. The more honest you are, the better you will paint, however that may be, and the more important a contribution you will make to the art of this century. We are making history now. The very questions we have about which era, which country, which style is right is structuring the styles of this, our time.