For the first time when I walked into the BP portrait award exhibition, the fact that it was sponsored by BP, hung with me. It’s strange, a corporate oil giant sponsoring painting. It has been doing so for 22 years. I’ve been visiting the annual National Portrait Gallery exhibition for 6 consecutive years, and not once did I compare it to steel and grease. Neither did activists actually, until the commencement of this years opening - a year after the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – who lined outside holding 14 portraits by Gulf Coast residents. The ‘BP facing the Gulf Portraits in Oil’ campaign hoped that by submitting the portraits for award consideration, it would compel them to “to Face the Gulf as it is for the people who live there and for all who care.” None of them did get through though.
Nevertheless this year’s run of portraits fell no less short of the cornucopia of faces I expected to see. As the government’s art funds take the recession blow, it seems such sponsors are the only way to keep art awards going (Especially this one, which accepts submissions from anyone. You don’t have to be experienced of qualified though it helps).
Every winning candidate has shown the ability to paint exceptionally and capture genuine human emotion. This year however every one of the five winning portraits tell a story, quite literally (none of that read into the eyes and the colours). One holds a pencil holding a wall, one is nude with her arms tide above her to a tree trunk amongst rocky mythical surroundings, one holds a knife with washing up gloves and curlers in her hair, and another stands in her fully painted bedroom. These represented personalities are a lot more explicit than you usually expect of winning portraits, and I wasn’t too sure how much I liked it. Sometimes the best portraits work when the individual is stripped bare of their normal surroundings, but you can still feel their essence and personas.
I am however by no means shunning these winning artists. The work this year continued the pledge to make contemporary portraiture valid in a modern world (as it stands on the opposite end of the Glamour of the Gods Hollywood photography exhibition). In our instant photography era, one of the biggest lures for the mass crowds was to see how a painting looked so much like a large printed photograph. It just attributes to the power of paint and the human hand. Have a look at my favorites: 'Six Decades' by Matthew Schofield, 'Jade (The Rehearsal)' by David Elchenberge, and “Adi” by Nathan Ford. They are all painterly but no less cinematic.
Another example, is the BMW and Audi battle on California's billboards, created by Juggernaut Advertising.