Tony Benn Interview
February 10th, 2013
I was invited to the House of Commons a while ago to do an interview with Tony Benn which took place last week. It has been 15 years now since I completed the portrait of him and they wanted to do an interview with us discussing the portrait for documentation. It was lovely to see Tony again, the last time I saw him was on one of his tours about 10 years ago in Telford but we’ve kept in touch over the years with Christmas cards and telephone conversations. His son Hilary Benn was asking the questions. It’s amazing how much momentum portraits of people in the public eye gather over the years, I’d still say that this portrait is one of the pictures that I’m most asked about, they tend to take on a life of their own afterwards. I hadn’t seen the picture for a while and it’s strange how you forget the scale of some of these paintings, it was much bigger than I had remembered, even within the scale of Portcullis House. This was the first of these interviews so I guess they’ll see how it goes but I’ll put a link to it once it’s published.
Entry Filed under: Art