The William Lock Portrait Prize 2022 for the most timeless portrait with a real feeling for paint and its aesthetic potential (Royal Portrait Society, London UK)
original oil painting on pressed wood panel
80 x 80 cm
I reinterpreted Frantisek Kupka’s self portrait which is painted with absolutely magical vibrant yellow tones. In my expressive style I use gradients, connections, voids, and tense colour fields. In this painted I also wanted to depict Kupka’s love for Orphism (a branch of cubism which abstracts bright colours), the musicality of rhythms through the interpenetration of primary colours and the intersection of surfaces. That’s why the yellow colour field vanishes into the man’s garments, becoming part of his attitude.
The dark fields of purple and black show the rhythm too. Although the portrait looks static, the rhythm of colours shows the storm of emotions inside the subject.
I’m amazed by the visual similarities between humans and their pets. Pets become our alter egos and we have indescribable bonds. Many of my favourite artists convey these bonds in their artworks, such as Valentin Serov’s ‘Count Felix Sumarokov-Elston’. Or Lucian Freud and his great love of dogs, and Kupka often elevated animals to the dignity of a person.
I make portraits in which there is always a reference to the other, because only in another’s gaze can the subject be assembled into a coherent image. Otherwise, a portrait would be an empty shell. I try to capture moments in which a person in relation to another person or creature discovers again and again the possibility of becoming whole.
