It is fitting that Jonathan Yeo should, for his part, answer any doubts about the potential vitality of contemporary portrait painting with the loosest of his works. In his portrait of Rupert Murdoch, Yeo captures his character with expressive strokes and bold patchworks of colour and then stops, leaving all else unfinished. It is a style he takes to an extreme, conjuring a human presence with the lightest of touches, in a depiction of his partner Shebah Ronay published as a lithograph. She emerges from the anonymous surface, distinct and individual with only a few, fluid, painterly strokes and a passage of grey pigment on the left hand side of her face bringing pictorial weight to the light, sketched form beneath. It is a confident assertion of the particular qualities of the human touch. Whereas a photograph captures all the visual information within a given frame, in, typically, the briefest of moments, the painted portrait is an articulation of information accumulated over many moments, information that the painter then sifts, selecting what is necessary to shape an image capturing the sitter’s essence. It is this that becomes the subject of the work, not the sitter’s appearance at one particular and potentially random moment. Such painted portraits are poignant records of beings in time and so uniquely human responses to the ephemerality of the human condition.

One of Britain’s best portrait painters Yeo is, extraordinarily, almost entirely self-taught. A period of serious illness whilst he was studying for a degree in literature and film encouraged him to follow his natural love of painting. He taught himself the old fashioned way by studying and imitating the styles and methods of any artist that interested him. In this way he progressed through the twentieth century, rendering everything from still lives, landscapes and nudes in a variety of styles, from cubist, to surrealist. Living beside the old Tate on Millbank helped and Yeo would often start his days looking at works that grabbed his attention.

It is this unusual education that accounts for Yeo’s remarkable versatility. Even now, more than a decade after his first serious portrait, Yeo remains highly experimental, applying varying styles and techniques to fit his vision of a particular subject, an implicit acknowledgement of the subjectivity of his task. Much of the time he executes variations on the theme of realism, from the looseness of the Murdoch painting, the tighter, more classical feel of his portrait of Dennis Hopper to the slick, TV-image like photo-realism of his depiction of Minnie Driver and a recent study of George Bush. But Yeo is equally happy to stylise. His rendering of Erin O’Connor captures a quality of verticality and the touch of the Art Deco that he observed in her whilst preparing for the portrait. O’Connor’s elegant, counter-clockwise curving pose combines with judicious cropping stretches the image so that it fills the tall, rectangular canvas. Meanwhile, to evoke the unreality of images crafted for media consumption, he subjects one of his several portraits of Tony Blair to a Gerhard Richter-like blur. Occasionally such inventiveness extends beyond style. Yeo caused controversy when he unveiled Proportional Representation, portraits of the three major British political party leaders in 2001, whose sizes were proportional to the number of seats they commanded in Parliament.

Despite their variety, all of Yeo’s works, as well as demonstrating fluent painterly ability founded on acute draughtsmanship, share a contemporary focus on the character of the sitter to the exclusion of all else. The background, or the subject’s clothes are of little or no interest to Yeo. It is the expressiveness of the face that matters. That first commission that set Yeo on his path, was of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the brave and famous anti-apartheid campaigner. Though the work of a young painter still finding his way, it already fulfilled the primary function of portrait – the communication of personality. It was an achievement of a type that Yeo found irresistible, saying, “It’s incredibly rewarding* when you get it right. As a subject another human being is one of the richest things you can engage with. There are so many mental and emotional responses you tap into. You can spend a lifetime exploring the possibilities.” In exploring those possibilities Yeo has artfully avoided art critic and poet Paul Valéry’s wry warning that for most of us observing is largely an imagining of what one is confidently expecting to see. Instead he looks at each of his subjects with a fresh eye and so brings each one his portraits to life.

© Nick Hackworth 2005

This essay taken from the book Figurations, published by Eleven.

Nick Hackworth is art critic for the Evening Standard.

Purchase the catalogue

Exhibitions include: Royal Society of Portrait Painters (Mall Galleries, London SW1), Historical Portraits Ltd (Dover St, London W1), Blains Fine Art (now Haunch of Venison, 23 Bruton St, W1), National Portrait Gallery (St Martin's Lane, W1).

For details of upcoming exhibitions please see the news section.

Solo Shows:

2008
Diptychs, December 2008 - January 2009, Eleven, Eccleston St, London SW1
Painting show - Summer 2008
Eleven, London

The Hospital Project
Two man show - Venue TBC

Blue Period, June - July 2008, Lazarides, Greek St, London W1

2007
Santa's Ghetto, December
15 - 25 November, ING Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London
All Modern Art Is Rightwing' panel debate at South Bank Centre. Grayson Perry, Jonathan Yeo, Munira Mirza, Ed Vaizey. Chairman: Tim Marlow. Organised by the Art Fund.
November 07 - January 08: inaugural group exhibition, Lazarides, Newcastle Bush August 2007
Lazarides Gallery, Soho, London

2006
17 February - 17 March 2006
Jonathan Yeo's Sketchbook
Eleven
London SW1

October - December 2001:
Election Art
Portcullis House
London SW1

Selected Group Shows:

2007
The Discerning Eye November 2007
Mall Galleries

25 November 2006 - 3 February 2007
BP Portrait Award 2006
Aberdeen Art Gallery, Aberdeen

29 September - 9 December 2007
Compton Verney
Warwickshire

8 June - 2 September 2007
The Naked Portrait
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Edinburgh

31 March - 20 May 2007
Royal West of England Academy
Bristol

11 January - 10 February 2007
Works on Paper
Eleven

2006

25 November 2006 - 3 February 2007
BP Portrait Award
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

22 November 2006 - 1 February 2007
400 Years of British Portraiture
Philip Mould Ltd

15 June to 17 September 2006
National Portrait Gallery
London

27 April - 26 May 2006
Figurations 2
Eleven

17 December 2005 - 12 March 2006
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Edinburgh

2005

6 October - 27 November 2005
BP Portrait Award
Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens

September 2005
Garrick Milne Portrait Prize
Christie's

7 October - 10 November 2005
Figurations 1
Eleven

June 2005
Historical Portraits
Grosvenor House Art Fair

15 June - 25 September 2005
National Portrait Gallery
London

27 February - 26 March 2005
Royal West of England Academy
Bristol

2004

12 December 2004 to 22 January 2005
BP Portrait Award
Aberdeen Art Gallery

2 October - 13 November 2004
Royal Albert Memorial Museum
Exeter

17 June - 19 September 2004
National Portrait Gallery
London

1 - 30 May 2004
Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2004
London

2003

May 2003
Royal Society of Portrait Painters 2003
London

2002

October 2002
ArtAid 2002
Bloomberg Space

2001

November - December 2001
British Portraiture
(curator Philip Mould)
Historical Portraits
London

Pre-2001

June - July 1999
Summer Show
Blains Fine Art
(Haunch of Venison since 2001)

June - August 1998
Summer Show
Blains Fine Art

November - December 1995
Gallery Artists
Blains Fine Art

June - July 1994
Art of the Chelsea Arts Club
Chelsea Old Town Hall

May - June 1994
Summer Show
Blains Fine Art

May - June 1994
Sudeley Summer Show
(Curator Mollie Dent Brocklehurst)
Sudeley Castle