BP Portrait Awards

The results of this year's BP Portrait Award competition were announced this week. The BP Portrait Award carries a cash prize plus world recognition. Sponsored by British Petroleum, the competition began forty years or so ago and limited to artists in the UK, though now it is now open universally. The finalists this year were decidedly eclectic in origin, training, and locale. Likewise, the paintings selected fell within a fairly wide range of the definition of portraiture.

Felicia Forte, "Time Traveller, Matthew Napping," 2017

For example, the second prize went to American painter Felicia Forte, a depiction of a friend sleeping, the figure strongly foreshortened against a background of vertical green and orange stripes. To my eye, this is a figurative work rather than a portrait, but the BP judges obviously think differently so I won't argue. An incandescent lamp burns white alongside the blue bed. The subject's face is nearly the smallest patch of color in the work. Although this is called a portrait, some would be hard-pressed to find a likeness.

On the other hand, the third prize winner was a traditional head and shoulders painting of a human subject, "Simone," a boy who lived in Florence, Italy next door to the painter. The winner, Tongyao Zhu, was studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze after having attended the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. This work is solidly within the European portrait tradition, showing chest and shoulders, well-modelled features, and exceptional light handling. There is a reference to differing cultures in the church buildings in the background, a device similar to those of the Italian Renaissance. It is a tour-de-force of academic painting.

Miriam Escofet, "An Angel At My Table"

The actual winner, "An Angel at my Table" isn't a traditional portrait, either. Nonetheless, calling this painting a portrait makes perfect sense. The painting is actually a portrait of the the artist's mother, but it is also considerably more. There is an innocent-appearing still life spread on a crisply-rendered linen cloth, but after the first quick glance you see the individual objects take on a surreal appearance--partly there and partly absent, strangely out of perspective and unbalanced, their vanishing point within the chest of the woman. The woman is elderly, bemused, her cheeks and hands ruddy with good physical health. She does not look at us the way a traditional sitter does but gazes to her left, out of the frame. The garment she wears suggests a housecoat or perhaps a nightgown of thick fabric.

The use of the term "portrait" for this painting is apt in my view. The metaphor in the still life objects seems to deal with the sitter's inner consciousness, inner beauty, and perhaps fragility too, while the poignant likeness gives us a look at her from a different vantage point.

One word: Brava!