Video and review of BP Portrait Award Exhibition 2016

The 2016 Exhibition for the BP Portrait Award is very different from previous years. 

That's not a surprise given that threre's been a change in the Director of the National Portrait Gallery and this year Jenny Saville was asked to be a member of the Selection Panel. The Director of the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland was also involved with the selection this year.

Video of the BP Portrait Exhibition 2016

For those familiar with the exhibition you can see the changes for yourself in my video of the exhibition below (which you can also see on youTube).  As usual the 'bumpy' view is due to me literally walking with my iPhone6+ around the gallery.

Apologies for the lack of audio - there's normally background "hum" but in this instance there was music playing and I don't have the copyright permission - hence it's now a very quiet video!

If you're unable to visit the exhibition, my video is particularly relevant to:

• getting a much better understanding of the relative size of the individual paintings
• appreciating more about the choice of subject, size, style, palette and approach to painting a portrait for this exhibition.

You can find out more about the individual artists:

• on the NPG website - see exhibitors. Click the individual images to see a bigger image and read about the painting and the artist
• in my blog post BP Portrait Award 2016: Selected Artists - which lists those selected by country and also includes links to their websites (where one can be found).

What's different in the 2016 Exhibition

The main changes I noticed are as follows:

• there are many more smaller portraits.  This is possibly a reflection of the cost of shipping original works - but I think is more likely to have been a deliberate choice by selectors.  I think it's maybe partly a rejection of the notion that you have to "go big to impress" - which is no bad thing. (I'm going to do a count of the sizes of the portraits - and will add this in to this post. I ran out of time today having had complications with making the video and the video upload. I do however now know where a video which has been made but crashes before it is shared goes on my iMac!)
• the photorealistic style has taken a back seat. A number of those painting realistic paintings are in fact painting from life.
• there are an awful lot of portraits cropped to head and shoulders / head and upper torso (ie minus hands) 
• there are absolutely no big heads of the type which were very prevalent in recent years

This view inclues the largest head in the exhibition

• there is a lot of realism but it's of a much more painterly variety
• I got a very strong impression than most of the subjects are identified very clearly as close friends and family:
• children eg. 
• Pearl in the morning, ready for school by Samantha Fellows
• Francesca by Daniele Vezzani. This striking painting was chosen for the cover of the catalogue
• A Portrait of my Son by Miseon Lee
• Jean by Jean-Paul Tibbles
• Stanley on a Painter's Rag by Keith Robinson
• Alice and the Planets by Lewis Chamberlain
• Die Vermutung I by Wolfgang Kessler
• Tad (Son Of The Artist) by John Borowicz

• spouses and partners eg 
• Oana by Boris Dobre
• Laura In Black by Joshua LaRock
• brother and sisters and in laws eg 
• Carol by Richard Burger
• James Rhodes by Alexander Chamberlin
• parents eg LMF03 by France Borden
• grandparents eg Bo Wang's grandmother in Silence
• close friends eg 
• Falk by David von Bassewitz 
• Vacuum 2 by Thomas Ehretsmann
• Petras by Laura Guoke

It seemed to me that the paintings selected this year in general have stuck much more closely to the brief. They represent portraits by people who have had plenty of opportunity to work from life with their subject.

• a number of portraits are self-portraits 
• both large - eg Self Portrait In Pembroke Studios by Eileen Hogan
• and small - eg Self by Shany van den Berg
• there are a number of portraits of fellow artists eg
• The Enigma of Jasper Rose by Saied Dai
• there are a few professional models. An example is: Portrait In The Mirror: The Veil
  by Antonio Laglia
• there are very few "famous people". Those selected are typically commission and not the conventional 'crowd pullers' i.e. 
• Sir Andrew Motion (who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009) - painted by Fiona Graham-McKay (see Artists with their paintings)
• Hugo Williams - the British poet, journalist and travel writer - painted by Benjamin Sullivan (see my video interview with him later this week)
• Harriet Harman MP - painted by Charles Moxon
• Laurie Weedon, D-Day Glider Pilot by Martin Yeoman
• It's also very clear that the subjects of these commissioned portraits subjects also sat formally for the paintings - much as the representatives of 'the great and the good' do when sitting for portraits commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.
• there are also some commissions of 'ordinary people'. For example:
• The Weaver by Joshua Waterhouse
• The 271 to Arsenal (Xavier & Max) by Teri Anne Scoble

One exception is Diversion by Charlie Masson - which does NOT conform to the brief for the paintings i.e.

The work entered should be a painting based on a sitting or study from life and the human figure must predominate.

I also noticed that, by and large, only well established portrait artists are painting people of note.

I must confess I'm very much in favour of this approach to selection. To my mind everybody selected for the exhibition should in theory be capable of accepting a commission from the National Portrait Gallery to paint a famous person. To do that they must be capable of making studies of and painting from life.

I pondered on the influence Jenny Saville brought to bear on the exhibition. She told me at the Awards Ceremony that she pushed hard for more painterly paintings.  It's certainly the case that are more painterly portraits and much less hyper-realism than I've seen in the past.

I'm going to do a count of the sizes of the portraits - and also count the different types of portraits (eg head only; head and torso; head and hands etc) and will add this in to this post. I ran out of time today having had complications with making the video and the video upload. I do however now know where a video which has been made but crashes before it is shared goes on my iMac!

I wonder what would happen next year if it was a requirement that every portrait had to include hands as well as a head?

More about the BP Portrait Award 2016

These are my blog posts

• Clara Drummond wins £30000 BP Portrait Award 2016 - Making a Mark
• BP Portrait Award 2016 - Artists with their paintings
• My "Best of the Rest" from BP Portrait Award Entries
• BP Portrait Award 2016: Selected Artists
• Comparison of the RSPP Open and BP Portrait Award Competition
• £30,000 BP Portrait Award 2016 - How to enter and how to get selected