Delighted to have won this award for the best small portrait at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition 2025 with a tiny portrait,
‘Ezra aged six and three quarters’ oil on a gesso panel 26 x 20.5 cm
The difficulty with children is their remaining still enough for long enough to make some decisions in paint.
It became an act of faith, that with persistence and the memorising of each shape or form in the moment of noticing, some small thing would be added during every brief encounter, developing mark by mark into a study that finally made some sense and approached the sort of depiction I was hoping for; to suggest in paint, something of that emanating brilliant life force, the wonder and the resilience of a childhood.
