10 Minutes With...Daphne Todd

We Ask the First Female President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Bp Portrait Award-winner and Tv Art Judge the Secrets to Her Painting Career.

- Sally Hales

You’re best known for your portraits, but also paint a variety of subjects. Is there one that feels most natural?

I feel most at home doing a portrait because a commissioned painting has to work from the off, so I am careful to select a room, background and lighting conditions I know will make a decent painting.

How would you describe your oil technique?

Direct – no preliminary drawing, always from life and not photographs, even for back-up. One battleground is enough. I use fairly dry paint with no medium, and tend to use short-handled sable brushes, which are intended for water colour, so it feels like drawing with paint and I can use my little finger as a mahl stick.

How did you develop your distinctive style?

It does not seem like a style to me. I did not aim at a style. I don’t work from preliminary studies because, when I was a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art, I was afforded the luxury of a model to pose for me for a term. Having been worried by my gloomy, grey paintings, I thought, if I did a perfect drawing of her, I would be able to work out the shapes and composition, transfer the outlines to canvas and apply bright, clean colour. The moment I began to paint I could see it was useless. The psychology of perception has the answers to this phenomenon, but it means you are painting experience, rather than illustrating an idea. Patches of colour must work for themselves.

Is there a secret to catching a person’s essence?