Feature: Exhibition - BP Portrait Award Show 2011 at National Portrait Gallery until September 18
Published: 11 August, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN
CHRISTOPHER Isherwood did it with I Am A Camera, a penetrating study of Berlin in the 1930s, which has stood the test of time; his Sally Bowles enduring, on stage and screen, in the musical, Cabaret.
Now Edward Sutcliffe, at 33, a young meticulous master of photo-realism, has equally done it with his study of MP Glenda Jackson, now 75, on show in the impressive BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
His study smacks you in the face – a small, almost square picture bereft of background, raw in red and crying out from the overall dramatic display, surprisingly of mostly older people.
Jackson is presented wrinkled and blotched, humbled by life’s assault, in close detail something like a slice of the battered moon.
Sutcliffe, a BP exhibitor for a remarkable fifth time, loves it – and apparently Jackson does, too.
“She was absolutely delighted with the result,” he told me.
“She thought it was a very moving portrait that reminded her of her parents. She’s happy about it – and I am, too. I have absolutely squeezed as much character, as much juice as I can out of her face.”
His ambitious aim is to capture something you would struggle to find with the human eye, an attempt, he suggests, to “question ideas of mortality”.
A statement under the portrait adds: “I tried to convey humility with strength, attributes that Ms Jackson has in spades.”
No doubt very true when you consider that the bricklayer’s daughter from Birkenhead was a sales girl in Boots before arriving at Rada and going on to win two Oscars before becoming Hampstead’s outspoken Labour MP in 1992 and winning her current seat by a mere 42 votes last time.
Sutcliffe himself comes from Walsall, the son of an art teacher, so used his obvious inherited talents extensively before going off to study art with art history at the University of Wales, and then taking a post-graduate diploma at London’s Central St Martins.
He accepts that photo-realism is regarded as “a bit of a dirty word” in the art world, some people finding the style “inexorable and too mechanical”, but he sees it as another art form, a genre in its own right – “just like landscape painting”.
His prime influences have been the figurative painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Camden Town’s own Frank Auerbach.
“So I’ve always found it quite hard to shake off that influence and move on into other styles,” he explains. “That’s why today I’m a figurative painter really.
“I’m trying to go beyond what the naked eye sees and in doing that I’m trying to strip away everything else.
“They’re quite minimal in many respects. I’m not someone who is going to go into too much detail with background, clothes, poses and compositions.”
Living first in Kentish Town and now in Inglewood Road, West Hampstead, Sutcliffe went to see Jackson at one of her constituency surgeries last November, waiting till the end before explaining his unexpected purpose.
She accepted the challenge, pointing out, however, that she was too busy to spend hours sitting for a portrait but agreed to allow him to take photographs at a coffee session at her office in Portcullis House.
Her portrait, not completed until the following March, was equally a challenge for him, as his past subjects have usually been unknown people he has met on his travels and not high-profile personalities, more of whom he now intends to seek out for a forthcoming solo exhibition.
“I am fascinated by the fact that, although we all share the same features, our faces are utterly individual and unique,” says Sutcliffe.
“I want my portraits to explore this tension between the distinctive and the homogenous.” And being a Labour voter – with liberal-minded reservations – helped in Jackson’s case.
And while at the National Portrait Gallery you can also see Glamour of the Gods – Hollywood Portraits, which, ironically, is probably where you might have sought out sparkling film star Jackson originally.
But in the world around us realism rules.
• BP Portrait Award Show 2011, admission free, is at the National Portrait Gallery until
September 18