Wendy Barratt won the 10th series of Portrait Artist of the Year on Wednesday night last week. She is, in my opinion - and in the opinion of many of those whose comments I've seen online - a very...
Wendy Barratt won the 10th series of Portrait Artist of the Year on Wednesday night last week. She is, in my opinion - and in the opinion of many of those whose comments I've seen online - a very worthy winner.
I predict good things and a lot of commissions in Wendy's future due to her skill in painting portraits. She's both grounded in drawing and traditional skills and yet has a very contemporary style of painting which both appeals to a wide range of ages and tastes - and looks good in contemporary spaces.
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Wendy's PAOTY Portrait Paintings
(left to right: self portrait submission; heat (Nicky Spence);
Final (Dame Joan Bakewell); Semi Final (Emma Bunton);
Commission for Final (her husband Fred) |
This week's review has been postponed while I travelled north and then moved "my inheritance" south at the weekend. The intention was to start writing the review on the trains up and back - but inevitably it didn't quite work out like that. Then I experienced a domestic emergency when I got home which delayed matters further - but here we finally are!
I'm going to do the Final and the Commission separately so Final today and hopefully Commission tomorrow.
This review covers:
The Final: Artists, Sitter and SetThe Judges' PerspectiveThe Final Portraits - and my commentsWhy Wendy won.READ: How to enter the competition in 2023
The Final: Artists, Sitter and Set
The Finalists
The three finalists are:
Wendy BarrattDavide di TarantinoLorena Levi
For me, one artist in the Final had been a foregone conclusion since Heat 6. Wendy Barratt had
amply demonstrated her artistic skills, sensitivity and mental toughness in her heat to make her presence in the Final a foregone conclusion - by me. Her subsequent calm and well considered performance in the Semi Finals simply outshone everybody else and I must confess by the end I in no doubt she would be selected for the final - but was also assuming she would win!
I was rather more surprised by the other two. Although both offered a great range in terms of style and technique, I thought there were also other artists who should have given them a challenge. Instead of which their decisions about how to impress at the Semi-Final Stage backfired somewhat. Or maybe they weren't sufficiently different.
Resulting in Davide and Lorena becoming the other two finalists. They offered:
Davide - the ability to paint portraits as if they were produced in the past - but always smallLorena - an approach where likeness is not always delivered and a technique which relies heavily on line but is not intended to be illustrative
Of the three, I think Wendy was probably the most experienced portrait painter - from life and with reference to photos.
Sitter and Set
The Sitter
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| Dame Joan Bakewell |
For the tenth series,
the makers of the series decided to honour
Joan Bakewell (i.e.
The Right Honourable The Baroness Bakewell DBE HonFBA FRSAl ) by asking her to sit for the Final.
As Joan had her 90th Birthday in April 2023 - when Series 10 was being filmed - this last episode of the 10th series is to be Joan Bakewell's last appearance on Portrait Artist of the Year. She's been hosting from the very beginning - but she is now not always able to make the filming for every episode.
I for one will be extremely sorry to see her disappear - not least because her comments on the Judges choice and views about indiivdual portraits were very often much in line with mine!
However I and am very glad to see her being the sitter for the Final. Not that she sat still a lot. In fact she was probably one of the worst behaved sitters in this series! :)
"She's a great sitter, bad at sitting"
I loved the clothes and colours which highlighted Joan's inimitable sense of style. I absolutely loved them.
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