INSPIRATION IN PORTRAITURE : REVELATIONS AT THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
- Haydn Dickenson
- Sep 4
- 3 min read
I've given up apologising for the many long 'radio-silences' on this blog. Over the past year, health issues have impacted on my creativity and productivity but, perhaps, the best things come to they who wait; so, dear reader, your wait is over! Now let's see if I can keep this up...
I recently met up with a friend who was over on a rare visit to London. I had not seen her for ten years at least, so the reunion was a joy in itself.
My friend is an artist of rare and searching vision, whose work in two quite divergent directions (industrial cityscapes and portraiture) carries a wistful grace alongside a probing and reflective honesty. Foremost in our conversation that day was portraiture and we decided, accordingly, to visit the National Portrait Gallery together.
My regular readers are aware that, though I am primarily an abstract painter, my taste in visual art is as eclectic as it is in music. I adore John Constable's passionate sketches and studies as much as I do Joan Mitchell's vast, joyous abstract expressionism. I was bowled over by Francis Bacon : Human Presence at the NPG in November 2024 https://www.artfullyabstractedblog.com/post/where-it-all-began but, since then, I had not absorbed much in the way of portraiture. Our traversal of the NPG last month was a revelation. I almost wish I was a portrait artist!
On the day we met, my friend had already visited the NPG's Jenny Saville exhibition just an hour before so we directed our attention to the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 exhibition https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/hsfk-portrait-award/ which I wholeheartedly recommend.
I was reminded how utterly compelling a portrait can be; how appreciating a portrait amounts to so much more than “Wow – it really looks like them!”, how a great artist can distil the essence of a person – as Bacon himself did – through a whole raft of representational approaches that have little to do with pure verisimilitude.
At the exhibition, I was deeply moved by Paul Wright's portrait of his mother, a dementia sufferer. Rather than emphasising the sorrow and tragedy of dementia, this tender and loving picture depicts a lady apparently at peace in her inner world, the objects of her daily life swirling around her in the room. Stillness and retraction at the end of life are balanced by a sense of movement that seems almost playfully vertiginous.
Willem De Kooning had a notion that - and I paraphrase - it is rather ridiculous to attempt to paint, for example, a nose, and the abstract painter in me naturally quietly aligns with the great Dutch-American master. We abstractionists tend to search for truth in pure mark-making, a subject that I explored in my article ABSTRACT ART AND REALITY (December 2022) https://www.artfullyabstractedblog.com/post/abstract-art-and-reality. Piet Mondrian believed that everything we see around us is an illusion and that a picture that is purely abstract is truer to actual reality than one which is overtly representational.
Everything runs in a cycle however and, as much as the pure marks made by a child embody an unselfconscious truth that may be seen as the root of all painterly expression, abstract utterance is covertly present in every brushstroke that, by proximity to its neighbour, builds at last the portrait that we see before us. Even in portraiture, the tiniest abstract gestures are the pixels of the final canvas.
The Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2025 Exhibition runs at the National Portrait Gallery, London until October 12th.
INSPIRATION IN PORTRAITURE : REVELATIONS AT THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY Copyright Haydn Dickenson 2025