Image of the Day

by tkpope

Jonathan Yeo. Girl Studying (Malala Yousafzai). 2012.

I visited the National Portrait Gallery yesterday to view the BP Portrait Prize, as I do every year but though it was, as ever, enjoyable, I found it less impressive as a whole collection as previous years shows. In a side gallery down the hall there is a small exhibition of portraits by the artist Jonathan Yeo, a largely self-taught artist who is famous for his paintings of celebrities and political figures. His skill as an artist is beyond all doubt, though the paintings on show of celebrities seemed to fail to reach past more than the surface and their beauty. We were seeing familiar faces in the way we are always used to seeing them. There was one painting however that captivated me, and this was probably more on account of the sitter than anything else. This is because Malala Yousfzai is well known not for a celebrity status, but because she was shot by the Taliban at age fourteen for being courageous enough to campaign for a girl’s right to education. Yeo works from both life and photographs, and the connection between the sitter and the viewer is one I found very strong, with Malala staring directly out of the painting, engaging the viewer on a human level and reminding us of her own personal strength, struggle and campaign. Whilst this may all seem as sugary and sentimentalist as Mark Hudson of the Telegraph has argued in his piece on the exhibition, I still couldnt fail to be engaged with such a subject as Masala.