Simon's Blog

I’m working on a drawing of the actress Juliet Stevenson at the moment.  The inspiration for this drawing is a new series on Sky Arts called Portrait Artist of the Year.  It is a competition to find, well, the Portrait Artist of the Year and the first episode was recorded in London.  The set up is pretty standard fare – a number of artists from England had 5 hours to make a painting/drawing of, in this case, three well know people.  The three were Juliet Stevenson, Robert Lindsey and Alison Steadman.

Now I know I would just wilt under the pressure of trying to produce a painting under the lights and people watching but I thought it would be interesting to try and do that within my own safe environment.  My first attempt is Juliet Stevenson.  One of the most interesting this that I got out of the programme that there were 17 versions of a likeness which in many ways is really quite reassuring as it means that we all see things differently and what one person might think is a likeness to another is nothing like the person being captured.  Such is life.