The Guardian / Sunday Observer – April 27th 2008 (Parliamentary Collection)
May 5th, 2008
Phil Hale’s recent portrait of Tony Blair prompted the following article on the Parliamentary Collection in The House of Commons. I’ve admired Phil’s work for many years now since he first exhibited in The BP Portrait Awards (around 2001 if my memory serves me), and I think he was an excellent choice to paint Blair, looks really good too from the photographs I’ve seen but I haven’t seen it in the flesh yet.
Anyway, here is an extract from the article which a friend pointed out to me last week refering to my portrait of Tony Benn.
Peter Conrad – Sunday 27th April 2008 -The Observer/(Sunday Guardian)
“The best parliamentary portraits have a candour that does credit to the artist and – perhaps even more – to the subject. Tony Benn chose to present himself to Andrew Tift as a private man in a messy, madly eccentric domestic setting with a transistor radio propped on a cardboard carton that does duty as a side table and a tacky plaster statuette of Marx on the mantelpiece. His shoelaces don’t match, and a button on his floppy cardigan is chipped. Only tyrants bother about posing as heroes; democracy, to its credit, is inured to human imperfection”.