BP Portrait Award 2009

Broken Heart by Donald Macdonald

This year's Portrait Award certainly showed a range of styles and abilities, some successful, some not so much. What was surprising was the selection of works chosen for prizes. I cannot see a coherent logic to the judging. Some works looked as though they'd popped straight out of A-Level including the winning painting Changeling 2 by Peter Monkman. No doubt a certain degree of technical ability is due some acknowledgment but I still find the piece unconvincing: there is something lacking in the work, in the face of the artists daughter (the changeling). I understand the concept behind it, the child changing as they grow older, and we can possibly extrude some feeling of the father's inability to connect with his daughter through the detachment felt when observing the figure but this, for me, does not make for a successful portrait.

There were a couple of works, however, that really beautifully described the human form and condition. Firstly, Portrait of my Mother by Hector M. Hernandez, is an adequately named depiction of the artist's mother as she sleeps on the sofa in the glowing evening light: A very loving and heartfelt portrait that appeals to the best in us. But, Broken Heart by Donald Macdonald would be my selection for first prize. The painting of his future father in law shows him exposed just after open heart surgery. It took a number of sittings and has taken on such a strong emotional aura through the relationship built with the subject. Macdonald had intended for the work to portray a man enduring the physical aspects of surgery but said ‘the painting became as much about the emotional effects of losing his wife in 1987’, something that could only be found and seen through a portrait.