Portrait of a blog

The Completed portrait of Ronald. (42″x32″ acrylic on canvas)

I finally completed the portrait of Ronald shortly before Christmas Eve. It was a wonderful painting to do, just the kind of subject matter that I like but also because Ronald and his son were so nice too. Unfortunately though Ronald never got to see the final painting because he died 3 weeks after our initial sitting so the the whole commission is tinged with sadness.

Often in my portraits I am interested in peoples objects and posessions within their spaces and the way that they reflect and reinforce the sitters identity, (see Tony Benn and The Kinnock’s) but here it is a simpler , more direct composition, less cluttered and arranged and I think it has a more natural feel to it and it is really “about the man”. Perhaps the more we just reflect on the figure, without any of the dressings the closer we get to the actual depiction/reflection  of the “the man”. Kind of like the the purity of an old blues recording by Skip James or the final albums of Johnny Cash where it’s just stripped down to the man and a guitar and the purity and fragility  just rings through the under-production.

If you want to take a closer look just click on the image and it’ll come up a bit bigger.

January 2nd, 2008

The Art Fund

If you are stuck for a last minute Christmas present mrmbership to The Art Fund is a pretty good one. You get 50% off entry to all major exhibitions and free entry to 200 fee charging museums and galleries, aswell as supporting The Art fund who have saved  over 860,000 works of art for the nation. Sounds pretty good to me. They have just released a pack of cards with some of the works on to promote their membership which incongruously features my triptych of Kitty in unbelievably good company, so thanks for that. For more info take a look at www.artfund.org

December 18th, 2007

LATEST UPDATE OF “RONALD” PORTRAIT

December 6th, 2007

SEQUENCE UPDATE OF MY LATEST PAINTING – “RONALD”

The First Emperor: The Terracotta Army – British Museum

I was invited to a corporate reception on Tuesday night at the British Museum. I had watched a few TV shows about this and it looked fantastic so I was very keen to see it. As ever BP put on a good show, champagne extremely tastey chinese style food.

 There are still about 6000 of these warriors still under the ground which is pretty interesting in its self, they are almost like a kind of resurrection and look so much better in terracotta rather than painted , which they origionally were (probably with high lead content paint which Matel still use) , but painted sculpture looks kitche so they look even better now. Reminded me very much of Anthony Gormley pieces when I saw them , all standing , looking at the viewer in the same direction, excellent. I loved their footwear too, I don’t know if the Chinese do the same as the Japanese -(slippers on when you enter the house-what a good idea) but I find eastern footwear most interesting. It was also a beautifully contextualised exhibition, real care had been taken over that.

While I was in London I had a meeting about my commission as part of winning te BP Award last year at the NPG and some pretty interesting names came up but unfortunately I can’t say anything about that, probably until the portrait is about to be unveiled.

October 24th, 2007

Compton Verney – The Naked Portrait.

Anne and myself and Jane, Mike and Kathryn went to the opening of The Naked Portrait at the beautiful Compton Verney gallery by Warwick. It was such a good exhibition, so much to see and very well curated/selected, though I would have tried to have got a Ron Mueck for this show, would have been perfect. As ever these days I was increasingly interested in the photography, some great portraits by Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and an incredible series of tightly edited large self portraits by an elderly photographer (Who’s name I made a special effort to remember but now I’m writing this I’ve completely forgotten)  , they were large close ups of his hands and knees and a very origionnal self portrait from the back with his head seemingly missing (bent downwards) and his hands sticking above his shoulders, almost like a rectangular Rothko composition. Just when you thought you had seen every possible posture for a portrait another fresh one comes along, this is why portraiture is so endlessly  fascinating, it’s about people, internal and external ,and thats all you need to keep you busy for a lifetime. Fantastic.

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGED

I was watching Gordon Brown make his maiden speech at the Labour party conference on More 4 news when my mother  phoned gasping for breath.

“Your’re on Mastermind !!!!”

“What ?”

“You’ve just been a question on mastermind”.

Then a series of telephone calls began, first of all Anne’s sister, Jane.

“You’ve hit the big time now Andy, you’ve just been a question on University Challenge”.

Turns out the show was actually University Challenge and the question was “Andrew Tift won the 2006 BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery with his triptych portrait of Kitty, who was her former husband?”

Apparently the pin heads looked at each other and didn’t have a clue. Several more telephone calls later and we switched over. There was a series of questions about 30 year old punk albums provoking the answers “Pistols, Jam, Damned and Clash” which I answered with consumate ease as I sat back brimming with pride at my knowledge of Punk.  Turns out that was the only one I got right apart from a question about the magnificent John Lee Hooker. I only ever get the art and music ones.

September 25th, 2007

Three Linked Portraits

Alex wrote to me a long time ago now having seen a diptych portrait of myself in the National Portrait Gallery that summer called “Pretending to be Jesus – 33”. He wanted a portrait of him and his wife in the style of The Arnolfini Marriage by Van Eyke, the incredibly beautiful painting in the National Gallery. At first I was a little hesitant because I thought that it might look like a terrible pastiche of a wonderful and famous painting and not stand alone so I hadto do something quite drastically different to take it away from the origional. Luckily Alex was very open minded and infact quite keen for me to develop my own thoughts on the composition. For me the lighting was a key issue and I used a very dramatic, charo sceuro style glow which instantly changed the mood and atmosphere of the painiting.  We considered a naked pose for Alex but he wore leather trousers instead with naked torso which contrasted beautifully with his wife’s traditional wedding dress and to me created a kind of tension in the portrait. In the origional the lady looks like she is pregnant,she actually isn’t, it is just the style of dress but most people just assume that she is. Alex’s wife is actually pregnant in this painting which caused a few problems and aching limbs during the sittings, ( or in this case standings). Whe their first child was about 2 years old Alex contacted me again and asked me to paint her. I’m always a litle hesitant about painting children because so much child portraiture is sentimental and twee but as it was Alex I agreed. We were sitting down and Alex gave his daughter a bottle of bubbles which she started to blow and we were away. Alex wanted an element of the “unfinished” in the portrait so the base tones around his daughters head and hands are still visible. It’s not something that I usually do and I must admit that I found it quite difficult to walk away from an unfinished painting. I often use grids and write a lot of notes on paintings as I go along in pencil but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave them on.  A year later Alex and his wife had a baby son and Alex asked me to paint him over a dinner in Islington one night which was great because the project was turning into a triptych ( though the origional painting was much larger than the subsequent 2) I finished this portrait of his son about a week ago and if you look at the next entry on the blog you can see the sequence and development of the portrait. Alex wanted his son to be the main subject of the portrait with a little portrait of his daughter – ( because she had already been painted) so she is depicted quite small in the background with the idea that she is in some kind of abstract, “white space” perspective.  During the second sitting , very early on when they were wide awake and running around I got some great action shots of them both looking very happy, anarchic and enthusiastic which I think is just right for kids rather than the formal school photo portrait.

August 27th, 2007

SEQUENCE FOR THE PORTRAIT OF “Joseph”

For those of you who are interested in how I put a painting together here is a sequence showing the way I made the painting. Initially with the base tones and then working in the heads and then finally the clothes. I like to work in the flesh tones first and make sure that that part is completed  to a high finish and to a quality that I am happy with before I move on to the rest of the painting because in a portrait obviously the faces are the most important thing to get right.

August 27th, 2007