My interest in the mind started with my psychiatry placement as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital. The psychiatrists were interesting people, enthusiastic about their work. They seemed to have great ability to form a rapport with their patients and with the medical students, and you felt that you were part of the team. In those days, a medical student could do a locum at SHO level. You couldn’t sign a prescription, but you could write it and somebody else signed it. So, I did a week of psychiatry at Guy’s. And again, I really loved it […]

Adrian was President during lockdown, leading the College from home. I’ve only ever seen him in brightly coloured trousers and crocs and a relatively straight T-shirt, which I’m assuming is purely because that’s the bit above the waist that you can see on camera. I’ve never seen him wear a suit, but he doesn’t need to be wearing a suit or the chain or the robes or whatever to show that he’s President. I don’t really like portraits that reinforce hierarchies. If you dress people in a certain way, it bars others from recognising that they too could be in that situation themselves. From a diversity and inclusivity perspective, I think it’s important that people are able to be themselves.

Kinetic aspects

The most sittings I’ll ever do is about five because I think after that point it just gets wearing. But I do use photographs as well because it wouldn’t be right for me to say ‘It’s going to take two days to paint your pyjama bottoms. Can you just sit there for two days, please and not move?’ It’s just not realistic. Like using a microscope, a camera allows you to see in detail what you can’t see with the naked eye, so it allows me to capture surfaces and to compose different elements and bring them together in one. So, a traditional painter would say ‘My eye is the lens’. I say, ‘Well, my eye is the lens, but so is my camera, because it allows me to tell the stories that I couldn’t tell just from direct one-to-one sittings.’ Sometimes I’ve videoed people. There are kinetic aspects to their personality and their body language, and I kind of really like to be able to capture those. So that’s what I do and that’s how I defend the fact that I don’t purely paint from life, which is seen by some as being taboo. […]