BP Portrait Awards

At the moment I am at home due to the fact it’s the Christmas holidays. Since I’ve been on holiday I been limited with the amount of practical work I can do for my coursework  however I have been reviewing my work and thinking about what I can work on when I return to school. Today I visited the National Portrait Gallery to view the BP portrait awards. I was stunned by the amazing quality of some of the pieces and could hardly believe some of the paintings weren’t photographs. A lot of the portraits painted were done of the artist’s family members, the fact that the portraits were of family members meant that there was a sense of connection between the viewer and the figure depicted. The artist had conveyed not only what they saw but also what they knew to be true to the person, there was a story behind each expression. Each painting was amazing in its own way, but some of them really stood out for me.
One of my favourite portraits was a painting of a seated woman named Jean Woods painted by Richard Twose. The painting is colourful and slightly abstract, the sitter glances out at the viewer. I looked at Twose in more detail and was interested to hear about the way in which he talks about his work. Twose describes his work as abstract yet he finds little satisfaction in abstract work so he always finds himself looking back at the subject. At the moment he is focussing on portraiture and painting figures inside rooms. ‘At the moment I’m working on figures in rooms. Interiors, as a theme, are introspective, unlike landscapes which are by nature expansive and outward-looking. By putting my figures in rooms they are contained, defined by these enclosed spaces.’ His painting of Jean Woods won the second place prize in the BP portrait awards.