I have come to electronic portrait painting through an ongoing search for perfection. My portrait paintings are so perfect, so lifelike, that one subject said, ‘It’s not like looking at a picture, it’s like looking in the mirror!’ Exactly! My portraits are indeed so lifelike that people assume at first glance that they are photographs. But because they are not photographs, because they are indeed paintings, I am able to reveal in them the hidden personality, character and beauty in my subjects. And because I reveal these qualities in a completely realistic way, viewers will always accept that they are the real you. You can see too, when you look at my portraits, that they also reveal my own love for my fellow human beings, and deep interest in them. My portraits are different from pictures painted in previous centuries. They are truly of the 21st century.
When you look round my site, you will see that all my paintings, and indeed my previous work as an artist-craftsman making miniature armour, demonstrate that I am truly a perfectionist. If you entrust me with painting a portrait of yourself or of someone precious to you, you can be sure that I will do my utmost to create a perfect image to delight you.
My electronic paintings are printed for me in London by a wonderful photographic process, which in essence makes a photograph from data created using a computer. When those data are created by an artist, the resulting picture is in fact a photograph of an image in the artist’s mind. It’s fantastic! Whatever you can imagine, you can create completely realistically, provided, of course, you can really paint well enough! The computer won’t do it for you! A computer is just a tool, like a brush or a hammer, and everything depends on the way you use it. It is, however, a very wonderful tool, and an artist can do with it what not even Rembrandt could achieve with a brush. Certainly, if I couldn’t paint with my computer, I would simply never paint again. The camera did great harm to representational painting. Now electronic painting has beaten the camera at its own game. It’s thrilling to be working at the start of a new era in art!
With electronic art, for the most part one produces prints, and could paint simply for this purpose. As regards single, original paintings, the original painting exists, if anywhere, in the artist’s mind. (The image is protected by copyright, but that is a different question.) In its electronic form a painting can be copied, stored and transmitted in various ways in seconds. Its visible forms can vary very markedly: it can be printed cheaply, or expensively by a photographic process, with no dot size and perfect colour reproduction. It can be large or small, back lit, built into a wall, whatever. One could go further. A portrait, for example, could be made to blink and seemingly breathe. The subject could have his or her eyes closed, and open them with a change of expression if the viewer spoke. This could be done now, at a price. But the real point is that, in the new world of electronic portraiture, one does not so much commission an "original" by x, as x to create exactly the image one wants, in exactly the form one wants it. Furthermore, your descendants won’t quarrel over your portrait, since each will be able to have an equally perfect original. Another consequence of electronic art is that your portrait will never be lost to your family, as were portraits in oils of some of my ancestors, during bombing in the Second World War.
Oil paintings and other portraits in natural media, however finely executed they may be, are always clearly paintings. The relative crudity of oil paint and brush strokes, for example, leaves you in no doubt that you are looking at an oil painting, and not in a mirror. Until now there has been nothing better available, apart from photography, which has its own limitations. Consequently, we have all just accepted the conventional way in which oil painting renders, for example, hair. At best you think, ‘Hasn’t he (or she) painted the subject’s hair beautifully.’ You don’t think, ‘Hasn’t the subject got beautiful hair!’ Now my electronic painting has escaped completely from the relatively crude conventions of natural media, oils, pastels, whatever. Now, as Shakespeare so beautifully expressed it, an artist of sufficient talent can truly ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ and create an image ‘to the life’. What Shakespeare could do in words so long ago, electronic artists can now do with images. It’s such fun to be alive and working right now!
Do I think that oil painting will vanish like, say, tempera? Not for a long time! After all, people still do things as anachronistic as ride horses and sail boats, from huge, new square-riggers to the smallest dinghies, just for fun. I do too! Probably for the foreseeable future people will, for recreation, pit their talents against the limitations of oil paints, pastels and the rest. I wish them happiness! But I want to paint portraits that are as perfect as they can be.
P.S. If you would like to experience crewing in a square rigged 'tall ship', may I suggest that you visit www.jst.org.uk?
Home Mike, Harriet, Oohna or Leila Self-Portrait Victorian Colonel Two Dogs Office Sketch of the Artist's Wife Miniature Armour