British portraiture
 

In another section Steve Craighead raised an interesting question about where British portraiture is headed:
Cynthia suggested it might make a good topic for its own thread.

Surprising, isn't it, that much of American portraiture often looks to the past, and to artists who came from the European tradition, while a lot of contemporary European portraiture is far more cutting edge and, some would say, "forward looking".

I personally love the Sargent/Zorn/deLazlo tradition but I don't usually think of American artists as being outpaced by their European peers in the race toward "the next new thing". (I'm probably just being "Amero-centric", though, if such a word exists!)

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.

That succinctly encapsulates my personal response to a lot of what I've seen in British portraiture. My personal take on what I saw was that there is a cold impersonality, to me the antithesis of the very idea of portraying a living human being as a human being. Harsh reaction? Okay, convince me otherwise.

I haven't paid much attention to British portriat painting, but I have noticed that portrait sculpture is extremely popular over there. Some of the best portrait sculptors I know are british and were taught in the traditional ways - some are current or past employees of Madam Toussaud's in England.
Anyway, here are a few British sites full of some fantastic portrait sculpture if you care to browse...

http://www.portrait-sculpture.org/

http://www.rbs.org.uk/pages/gallerie.../moreinfo.html

http://www.commissionaportrait.com/q...word=sculpture

Having just read Sanden's response to the WSJ article I wanted to post a link to Richard Stone's web site. He is not an artist (as far as I can tell) that has received much media attention in recent years, but his work is excellent.

http://www.richardstoneuk.com/


Simon

Stone's "Flavia" portrait is wonderful. The others are very good too, but that one is of his child, and the emotional connection shows.

This is an interesting discussion. I also just finished a portrait for the BP Portrait Award and I am now working on a portrait for the competition organized by The Portrait Society of America. The subjects I choose for these two competitions are quite different from each other.

I have noticed that portraiture in general in the US indeed tends to be more classical looking, edges are softer, the choice of clothing can be a bit

I believe there should be room for both classic traditional and more contemporary style portraits, but I find it hard to accept that they are put up against each other. Nothing is too old fashioned nor too modern. What counts is that they are created honestly, and not primary for the news headlines.
Though I also believe that portraits built on the classical tradition should not be judged along with modernist
style portraits. It does`nt make sense for classical music to be set up against pop music in a competition. Its impossible as I see it.