Portraits in Winchester

Robbie Wraith, 'Tina Wraith'

There is an exhibition of portraits going on in Winchester at the moment, shared by various Jewry Street spaces. The Gallery in Winchester Discovery Centre has a selection of portraits by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Rather than commissioned works, these are paintings from the artists' private collections, under the heading 'Family; Familiar'. Portraiture is a good example of 'The more you know, the less you know'. Direct and up-close images allow you to scan a face far more than you ever can in real life; and the more you observe, the more you want to know about the sitter. What is their story? Where is this room? What did they do the day before, and what thoughts went through their mind during the process of being portrayed? Around a still moment in a life, we weave a narrative. It's a journey pthat recently inspred a National Portrait Gallery publication, Imagined Lives. In this exhibition, the text accompanying the pieces helped to piece out the human story behind it, sometimes rather touchingly.




There is plenty to admire in a formal sense - a mixture of media, from popular oil to egg tempera (Anthony williams's fascinatingly lucid and detailed 'Portrait of Caroline' (2011), to an Anthony Connolly pencil sketch and a charcoal sketch by Robbie Wraith of his wife Tina, which I found arrestingly delicate and engaging - my breath-catching moment of the show. I liked the mysterious play of angles, surfaces and reflections in Michael Taylor's 'Woman Cradling Glass Vessel' (2010), and the optical tricks in the same artist's 'Couple', in which his wife's hair is parted to reveal a painting he made of them at the age of 17 entitled 'Flying'. Carpets lift, impossible apertures emerge, but all somehow contribute to the emtoional pull of the whole work. Paul Brason's 'Eighteen' confronts us with a young man of presumably that age, a Vermeer-like cast of light from the window falling across the door behind and bringing out the folds in his black shirt. There's an air of vulnerability mixed with confidence that made me think of Titian's 'Ranuccio Farnese', which is the highest praise of which I'm capable. Brason's small portrait of Roy Strong had an immediate, affectionate feel. I was fascinated by the story behind Toby Wiggins's 'Self-Portrait after George' (2013). The artist has for years been intrigued by the self-portrait by George Spencer Watson (1869-1934), and eventually made his own self-portrait modelled on it, painted in the same room and house as the original. But all the pieces are impressive, and make a fine riposte to anyone still claiming the art of painting is dead, or in recession.
Downstairs in City Space, an exhibition '9 out of 10 Believe' presents a series of figures, portrayed by three different artists: Mark Michael (satirist), Evelina Dee-Shepherd (realist) and Ben Mousley (expressionist). I found it hard to get into this: there was too much text for my taste, either as part of the images themselves, or accompanying the individuals; and the knowledge that what we were told veered from biographical fact to complete fabrication was irritating rather than compelling. The general air of attempted cleverness clouded any sense of the personal. Well, most of the work is sold so others clearly 'got it' better than I did.

Also in City Space is 'Winchester Death Masks', but this merits a separate post.