Faces at an Exhibition

It used to be called the BP Portrait Award, open to British artists under forty. Lucy Willis won in 1992.

It is still held annually at the National Portrait Gallery but now it’s the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award open to professional and amateur artists over eighteen from around the world. It is a provoking, stimulating, often moving, selection of portraits almost all of which grabbed my attention. You might contrast it to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition at Mall Galleries. I haven’t been for a few years but I remember them as being bland portraits painted to please the sitter and destined for walls of board rooms and chintzy drawing rooms. It finished in May 2025 so you will have to wait until next year to form your own opinion. The NPG Portrait Award show runs until 12th October.

As you know, artists learn, draw inspiration from and pay homage to earlier artists. This cropped up last year in Going Dutch and I find it interesting to compare some of the entries at the NPG this year with their mentors.

Jan van Eyck inspired another portrait this year: Light and Shadow by Shinji Ihara. The connection stretching over six centuries is by no means as clear.

Now here is a sitter you will recognise and luckily it is a big picture as it draws the biggest crowd.

Hard to choose, but this is my favourite this year.

“The portrait represents Wright’s 81-year-old mother, a person with Alzheimer ‘s disease. Dressed in blue with a book resting on her knee, Patricia is fixed at the centre of a swirl of half-formed objects – a piano, a doll, a cello, a hat – each with its own separate existence. In this dynamic, moving portrait, Wright represents his mother’s shrinking world, a collection of disconnected memories symbolised by the objects from her past.

Paul Wright (b. 1973) undertook a foundation course at Loughborough College and studied illustration at Falmouth School of Art. Wright’s work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions and international art fairs with a variety of galleries. He was previously selected for inclusion in the Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014.” (NPG)

The standard at the NPG is high and many competent artists must be disappointed every year at not getting their faces on the walls. However, there is one picture this year that should not have made the cut – my highly subjective opinion. I will not let you see it as inevitably artists make vanity searches, as I think they are called, and this one might be offended. Instead here is the one that got first prize.

”Moira Cameron’s self-portrait marks a return to her independent artistic career, and her own solo exhibitions described by Cameron as ‘a re-invention’. The portrait is an evolution of a self-portrait made at art college. Cameron says: ‘The lines on my face, the subtle shadows, tell a story of time passing, of laughter and worry, of a life fully experienced.

Moira Cameron (b. 1962) undertook a BA degree in fine art painting at Ravensbourne College of Art followed by an MA in fine art at Chelsea College of Art. She relocated to New York with her husband, Pop artist David Spiller, where she created text and graffiti works. The couple returned to the UK and Cameron paused her own career to support Spiller until his death in 2018. Cameron then worked in collaboration with her son, Xavier, as Spiller + Cameron producing mixed media collages that were included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the UK and USA.” (NPG)

And so to lunch at The Portrait restaurant on the fourth floor.