TIM BAKER

Lacking my usual live portrait sessions, I’ve been taking part in the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Week. This is a virtual sitting of four hours, live streamed on Facebook and I think broadcast on Sky Arts with a celebrity sitter. I came to it a few weeks late, but I did the previous weeks anyway in one crazy session. You can see Akram Khan, the dancer below which was finished in two hours, and writer Bernadine Evaristo which I struggled with and took four hours. Both of them were on a black gesso ground, half of a 16×20″ canvas board each.

I loved the expression of Bernadine, sort of quizzical and scared yet defiant – a lot of the sitters are nervous which shows, making it a little hard to make them feel more human. Kate Bryan, who is a host of the Sky Arts shows liked this one! My first blue tick like 😉

The next that week was John Rankin, the photographer. Another four hour portrait, this was on hardboard but this time on my usual verdaccio-like ‘green-brown’ ground with W&N Griffin Alkyd oils. Ground is the colour underneath the oil (sort of primer, but usually you prime it first and add the ground colour, or add colour to the gesso primer), and as oil is translucent it changes how the colours appear. It’s easier to paint on a canvas that isn’t white as well. Greeny-brown is the reverse of skin tones, so helps the oils ‘pop’ and shine. A lot easier to work with than a black ground.

And then this week, week four was Rob Rinder – the artist’s pose was similar to previous weeks, but during the chat he held up his French Bulldog Rocco (I think he’s called Rocco) and I fell in love with that pose – and also I love bulldogs. So of course to make my life really hard I decided to do a double portrait with his dog! The first time I have ever painted a pet, or a dog. Funnily enough I found it more interesting to paint the dog (sorry Rob, but Rocco is a star!) and it’s quite a funny portrait.

This was three and a half hours, and on an old-master ground, dark brown (a near raw-umber brown acrylic and black gesso) which you can see a little poking out in the picture frame which worked surprisingly well – unlike the black ground it didn’t darken down the colours as much – guessing the brown gave it warmth.

I found the Griffin oil grounds dry too slowly, so given gesso is usually an acrylic base, I just added some Pebeo Studio brown to my black gesso and it worked really well…will do that in future.

And as a postscript as well as the Artist of the Year account liking a few of these portraits, Rob Rinder likes my portrait!