emsley

Michael Simpson


I go to the National Portrait Gallery to see the BP Portrait award every summer and thought it would be a good place to start looking at how contemporary artists paint portraits. I came across the artist Paul Emsley and absolutely loved this portrait - I love the detail, the lighting and the expression in the image. I feel like I could look at this man's face for hours wondering about his past and looking at each contour on his face.
The colour pallette used is also really interesting. I have mostly been working with black and white images as well as drawing and painting mostly in a greyscale. At the moment this is because I am just sketching out portraits at the moment, and it is mostly about the lines in the face, the shape and the tones rather than the colours. However, I do think that the use of the dull greys, blues and oranges are extremely effective, and the colours alone are haunting and ominous.
The image however is too photorealistic for me, it reminds me of work that I used to do a few years ago when I was primarily concerned with accuracy and often neglected the feelings and emotions in the brush work. I want to make sure that my portraits are full of expression and history so will probably have a much looser, expressive approach to my paintings. However, I haven't seen the painting in real life, and it is over a metre squared so the photorealism may be due to the fact that the image above has been condensed considerably. Scale is definitely something I will have to play around with, in the past the scale of my pieces has varied from enormous 5ft square paintings to tiny drawings in the centre of an A4 piece of paper.