Portraits

Twenty plus years ago I started a portrait of Gill to enter for the BP portrait awards, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Study and work got in the way and having laid out the composition (and very manga looking Gill) the canvas sat in an attic collecting cobwebs.

Ten years later, I found myself in the NPG, to attend the opening of an exhibition on the London 2012 Olympics. Brian Griffin had been commissioned to take a series of portraits of those involved with the building of the olympic park and as one of those people, I got to be a very annoying sitter ( I kept wandering off to look at stockpiles, when I wasn't in shot). So there I was represented as sitter in the gallery, I had always hoped to get in from the other side..So another 10 years later, cobwebs removed, my sitter aged twenty years - no memory of what I had been planning left, I completed the portrait.. Over the oceans, she kindly moved her head this way and that way, taking selfies so that I could work out what exactly was going on with the original layout. In the end, the background probably was the bit I was most interested in, but she stands presented, a mixture of woman in her early 20s and mid 40s...