This week I’ve veered off my brief, and instead of making up my face, I am considering it. I do not enjoy being looked at, far less studied. In photographs, my features which in reality are only too soft and pulpy, become sharp, all planes and angles, rendering me unrecognisable. Maybe this is why we enjoy taking pictures of infants: they have not yet learnt their worldly, formal faces. I have very few pictures of myself or others: a passport photograph of my father resembling a terrorist; a rogue’s gallery of siblings; a portrait of a beloved friend who died young in which he appears unassailable. Perhaps this is the seat of my objection. Photography strikes me as inauthentic, the immortalising of a moment that never actually existed. And yet few genres hold me in such thrall as painted portraiture. In the Renaissance, such depictions may have been referred to as “counterfeits”, but something about such counterfeiting appears emphatically more realistic.
These days, I speak with some authority as I recently sat for up-and-coming portrait painter Lucy Moore. Lucy received a classical, atelier-style training at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence. To the lay sitter, this means that she positions her model next to the canvas, viewing them from a distance to retain a fluid impression of light, scale, the entire person, without becoming lost in detail. Her style is sensuous, painterly, steeped in chiaroscuro and emotional use of colour, the opposite of those ironed, hyper-real renditions in vogue at the BP Portrait Awards.
Moore is a lurer of character. Unlike many young painters, she does not seek out in-your-face, sensationalist subjects – all piercings, scars, or crag – preferring to draw personality out. It was a study of a friend’s father that determined me to sit. Photography rendered him merely sour. Her portrait captured him as so truly, terrifyingly, saturninely himself that we were forced to turn the image to the wall. (If you do not have the fortune to have run across an artist you admire then the Royal Society of Portrait Painters can provide a steer on 020-7930 6844.)
Of late, Moore has been going through something of a male phase and is about to paint Boris Johnson and some pop star that I am too high-court-judge to have heard of. But, generally, she finds that women are more interested in sitting, and relishes getting to grips with children. The speed of her style must be no small advantage. We met twice, for two or three hours, and that, rather uncannily, was that. Which is not to suggest that I did not enjoy the process: Lucy tells me that I am uniquely skilled at doing nothing. Sitting is a curiously collaborative process, a situation of unusual intimacy, and some people fight it tooth and claw. What worked for me is the passivity of the thing, the blissful impossibility to pose, or take any responsibility whatsoever. One merely exists. So submissive was I that I resisted even glancing at the image until the job was finished. A colleague has described the result as “romantic”, but I can find nothing euphemistic in it. There is a vulnerability about the portrait that I refuse to unleash in everyday existence. For me this is all in the lips, peculiarly reticent-mouthed for one so runaway-tongued. I am revealed but not exposed, truly represented.
Lucy Moore’s work currently costs between £500 and £3,000; www.lucymooreportraits.com