Portrait perfect

PHOTOS Anthony Lycett and Craig Wylie WORDS Nadine Botha

The new National Portrait Award launched by Sanlam Private Investments has reignited the conversation about what makes a good portrait. Craig Wylie, a Rhodes University graduate internationally renowned for his arresting paintings since winning the 2008 BP Portrait Award in the UK, sheds some light.

How did you get into portraiture?

From a young age I’ve drawn people, both imaginary and real. As I became more serious about art as a vocation, it was a natural progression to continue this interest in the human figure.

What is the appeal of portraiture?

I love what a good portrait does to me. It seems to operate on a visceral level. I’m interested in all kinds of painting and art in general, but the works that move me are more frequently figurative. I feel it’s possible to create something very interesting with coloured paints, a flat surface and a human subject.

What is unique about your portraits?

I suppose there is a peculiar contradiction in my current work. At first glance the portraits appear to have a solid presence, created by the high level of photo-reality and large scale. However, while one continues to look, this seemingly apparent certainty of existence seems to oscillate and fragment, and the paintings take on an ethereal, almost weightless, feeling. This may be enhanced by the fact that I paint from a computer screen and try to combine the photographic light within the photographs I work from and the actual physical light that passes through them from a backlit computer screen. The figures, therefore, could be seen to flicker between having an actual physical presence, created through the multilayered process of painting and, because they are also flat, almost not existing at all. Just being hologram-like impressions of themselves, cyphers of possible lives lived or just ghosts of energy briefly flickering in human form. This constant switching between presence and apparition as one looks at the painting seems to me to give the works a haunting quality.

What makes a good portrait?

I think it must leave an impression beyond mere likeness. The painterly elements of line, colour and form must congeal into something that has a life of its own. It doesn’t have to look like the sitter, even. Just excise something from the condition of looking at and/or thinking about the sitter, and trap that in the paint.

The deadline for the Sanlam Private Investments National Portrait Award is 13 August 2013 and the winner of the R100 000 prize will be announced on 27 August. For more info and entry forms, visit spiportraitaward.co.za