What I learned painting people I have never met (in person)

Remote shoots let me meet incredible people and share their stories. As a person, I loved it. As a painter, it was hard.

 

It is really hard to paint someone you have never physically seen. Video helps, it gives an illusion of the three dimensional form but that sense of really seeing them is still missing. It exposed something I have struggled with since graduating from Heatherleys.

 

How do you paint a portrait in an age of digital imagery?

 

The easiest thing in the world is also the hardest. You ask the model for a photo to work from, then you try to work from it. 

 

Why painting portraits from photographs is HARD

First up is the curation issue. When the model picks the photo they pick a moment that feels best to them. 

Often that is the conventional magazine cover pose. There is nothing wrong with that. But my job is to tell the viewer something about the person. Sure they are beautiful. But what else? What in the pose, the palette or the method says something beyond beauty? What makes the painting more than a snapshot of one moment on one day?

 

Flatness is the other problem. Painting from life, you turn 3D into 2D. Painting from a photograph, you turn 2D into 2D. I often wanted to paint a limb or a hand from the 3D memory of the body. The flat photo had translated it into something that did not feel sensible or painterly. Multiple reference images and video helped me recall how the body had looked. The Turps mentoring helped me pinpoint the block and get past it.

 

A case study: Nicolas Desroches

Nicolas is the author of Coeur de titane. With Caroline Bonis he co-wrote Battements contraires, a play about living with a heart condition that is staged by Collectif L'Empreinte. I used a mix of images from our remote shoot and some he sent over.

Water and swimming were such a big part of his story that the painting needed water. I made the whole background water and air, with strong light and bubble elements. The palette features a very specific blue. The ground is an N7 neutral grey. I am trying to capture the feeling of swimming with the currents.

 

Photo: Charlie Kirkham, remote shoot with Nicolas.

Mismatched references turned out to be a gift. I could not copy slavishly. I had to paint imaginatively and let the contradictions in light and setting enter the paint.

 

Work in progress images: Nicolas swimming WIP, Title TBC, Charlie Kirkham

 

It is my great privilege to work with Sudden Cardiac Arrest survivors from all over the world,  creating paintings and sharing their stories.

Nicolas writes: 

 

“Painting is an art that allows us to see people who have survived cardiac arrest through a different lens — beyond the medical emergency, beyond the scars, and beyond the heart that stopped beating. It reveals the person, their story, their resilience, and the beauty of a life that was given a second chance.” -Nicolas Desroches

Heart Heroes is supported using public funds from Arts Council England.

 

Remote shoots cost time and materials. Help me keep this project going: join the studio list.

 

About Nicolas Desroches

  Photo courtesy of Nicolas Desroches

 

Nicolas Desroches was born in Mâcon in France and has spent nearly 20 years as a journalist at the Journal de Saône-et-Loire. After learning he had inherited a rare heart condition, he survived a cardiac arrest at 41 and now lives with a defibrillator under his skin. He shares that story in his book Coeur de titane (Librinova, 2022), which was adapted for the stage as Battements contraires.

 

 

 

About the author

Charlie Kirkham

UK Visual Artist based in the Midlands. 

View all posts by Charlie Kirkham