BP Portrait Award Book, 2002

Foreward

By Richard E. Grant

Biography, film and photography record both the famous and the infamous for posterity. But actor Richard E. Grant believes that it is the painted portrait that has the power to endure.

A film director advised a friend of the artist David Hockney to keep going to the museum: ‘The pictures don’t talk, they don’t move, but they last longer.’

On my first trip to Hollywood, I expected to find numerous statues and sculptures commemorating and celebrating the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. Yet when I asked where I might find them, there was a genuine dumbstruck pause, advising that ‘the Hollywood waxwork museum is about your best bet.’

‘But wax melts,’ I countered, ‘surely there must be some permanent monument to these famous faces somewhere?’

‘Uh uh.’

Perhaps the most prolific portraitist, of the famous and the infamous, was Andy Warhol. Warhol made silk screens of photographic images, homogenizing them in his unique style, rendering a photo into a ‘painted portrait’. His multiple portrait of Monroe is probably as familiar as any of her films, if not more so. Despite making his own films at the Factory, it is his portraits that have endured and continue to arrest our attention. Working from the theory that it takes nine months to form a human, and nine months for the human body to decompose, the painted portrait similarly arrests your attention longer than a photograph, which takes a millisecond to snap. From which I assume it is the element of time that’s involved. You can shoot holes through this theory instantly, but the distillation of time inherent in a painting seems to hold our gaze longer.

When asked to write this introduction, I immediately grabbed a dictionary – ‘portrait: life-like description, likeness, image, representation, interpretation’. All the things that artists have done and will continue to do, despite the meteoric explosion of photographic, digital and computerized technology, and what’s yet to come.

Having been a regular visitor to the National Portrait Gallery in London, I have never tired of seeing the same faces looking back at me. Perhaps because they defy time, like Dorian Gray, by never ageing, even though the period in which they were painted is always obvious. The fascination of seeing a 400-year-old face is at once hypnotic, mysterious and reassuring, making you feel an intimacy with the past that no other medium quite fulfills in the same way. Here is the dress worn by Elizabeth I, mounted in a glass case, lit and labeled. Yet it is powerless to conjure a presence in the way that her portraits manage to do.Despite the current vogue for art installation and creature ‘pickling’, the need to represent, interpret and describe each other’s faces is indestructible.