Hello world!

I thought I ought to kick off my art blog with some art of my own – it only seems fair to go public before I start talking about other people’s.

So here are some sketches.  The first one was a practice sketch for a portrait of my friend Dave (I might feature the actual portrait at a later date…).  The others are preliminary sketches for portraits of my parents.  I don’t think I’ve quite finished the paintings yet, and my parents don’t even know I’m painting them, so I’ll put up the actual paintings when they’re done.  Sorry if the pencil’s a bit hard to see…

I started painting potraits because I find people more interesting, even though painting them is pretty tricky.  I’ve found the process really interesting too – it’s the most time I’ve spent with my parents in ages.  And it throws up some pretty interesting questions about how you capture a person – you can paint a brilliant likeness of someone (not that I have!), but have you really captured them?  Have you captured who they are?  It boils down to how do you paint the truth about someone? Is the truth just what you see, or is there more to it than that?  And then how do you flatten that down and stick it to a canvas?

I’ve had these thoughts buzzing around for a while, and they made for an eye-opening visit to the BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery… but more on that another day…