Capturing the emotions of the nation’s heroes on canvas
Artists offered to immortalise NHS workers with portraits that have brought extra meaning to their lives and ours, writes Tessa Coleman
Until recently I thought I was good at self-isolating. As a painter, I spend days in my studio shutting out the world. It’s a perfect occupation for a socially distancing, colour-obsessed control freak like me. What I couldn’t anticipate was how weeks spent in lockdown with just close family, trying not to be overwhelmed by the waves of coronavirus news washing over us, has left me utterly distracted and struggling for purpose in my normal working life. Seeking connection with my painting community via my tiny screen one day, I came across two intriguing Instagram posts from painter friends, both offering a free portrait to National Health Service workers on the front lines of the crisis. My interest was sparked.
A quick investigation uncovered the impetus behind the posts. The initiative was started by Tom Croft, another English painter who was also finding regular work impossible. He started thinking about the ability of portraiture to capture pivotal moments in time. “So who should be immortalised today?” he told me later, “Who should line the walls of galleries for future generations to look back on as the people who really made a difference during this global crisis? The people who knowingly risked their lives on a daily basis for our well being, our NHS workers.”
Tom began “Portraits For NHS Heroes” by posting a video on his Instagram feed on April 4, offering a free portrait to the first National Health Service front-line worker who got in contact with him. He tagged a few artist friends, started the #portraitsforNHSheroes and waited for feedback. The response he got was extraordinary: in the first two weeks he paired over 500 NHS workers with artists. The BBC got wind of the story and featured Tom’s initiative on the national news on April 21. Over the next 24 hours Tom faced a tsunami of several thousand enquiries from artists and NHS workers via direct message, email, phone and text. At this point he realised that he had to find another way of the matching artist to NHS worker so devised a traffic light system on Instagram: a green post for the portrait offer and a red post to say the offer has been accepted.
I was ill in bed when I first saw Tom’s video. Even a mild case of what my doctor assumed was the virus had left me feeling wretched. Posting the green portrait offer on Instagram late on April 28 was my first positive step towards getting back to work after 10 days of exhaustion.
By morning I had already received a dozen replies from NHS workers. Henry Hill was the first. Henry is a young NHS nurse who works in the Acute Neurological Rehabilitation Unit at Salford Royal Hospital.
Once we began messaging, he asked me if I could paint his dad for his 70th birthday. This presented a moral quandary – I wanted to do something meaningful for Henry, but his dad, Graham, is not an NHS worker. I resolved the issue by offering to paint them both.
Normally when I am painting a portrait I work from life. For me the resulting painting is a record of time spent with the subject, a gradual accumulation of observations, both visual and psychological, which build up into an image. Obviously this working method is impossible under lockdown, so I was left with working either with photo references or Zooming with Henry to paint the portrait. Zooming proved impossible, since Henry was working long days and far too busy to sit staring a small screen while I stared back at him.
I find photo referencing challenging. Any photo is a partial record of a person: lighting, angle of shot, lens length and a host of other variables all combine to produce wildly differing fleeting impressions, particularly when you are working from someone else’s images and have no control over the input. Working only from photos is also a minefield because you don’t get to know the person as they unfurl to you during sittings. You are flying blind as to their character and how they present themselves to the world.
Agreeing to paint Henry’s father helped in this respect, however. The family snaps I was working from showed both the resemblance between father and son, as well as close and happy family relationships, all adding to my hypothesis of the sort of people they seemed to be.
Drawing Henry first seemed to offer a solution. Instead of the portrait being an accumulation of first-hand observations in paint, it became instead an accumulation of processes: getting to know Henry’s face line by line with my pencil, and then introducing abstract colour planes until slowly his face took shape before me.
With those changes to my normal working method I was pretty nervous to send the finished portrait image to Henry and his family. I had no idea if my interpretation of Henry would correspond to the man that they know and love. The message I received from Nicola, Henry’s wife, was totally thrilling. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to perfectly capture what I see when he gets home exhausted after a 14-hour day, One of the first things I said to H was, ‘how does she know?’ It’s like you saw an intimate moment when he came in from work, very strange, but amazing.”
Only when I finished both paintings did I realise that throughout the process I had never actually heard Henry’s voice. We had communicated entirely through our screens by message and email. Two things struck me: although we had not spoken, sustained close study of the family photos had enabled me to get to know them all a little. And Henry had become something else too in my mind, a representation of all the healthcare workers working around the clock that we see night after night on the news: dedicated, exhausted, hot and uncomfortable in their personal protective equipment. Similarly, Graham had become the embodiment of that older generation right on the cusp of the 70-year dividing line, being asked to hide themselves away from society for three months despite being (as far as I could tell) completely healthy, full of life and energy.
Tom’s “Portraits For NHS Heroes” initiative has now gone international. Countries where artists are doing their own version of the initiative include Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Canada, USA, Malaysia, Australia, Poland, and Croatia. There are plans afoot to have an online exhibition of all the paintings created during this crisis, and Tom is discussing the possibility of a national physical exhibition of selected portraits once our museums and art galleries are open again. Here are a selection of portraits chosen by Tom that have been painted in the last few weeks, each with its own story of both healthcare worker and artist.
The project has shown the power of small beginnings and how they can grow exponentially in our hyper-connected world. It has also demonstrated to me the importance of different forms of human appreciation and connection in this time of enforced separation, cut off at home and both utterly reliant on and imprisoned in our tiny screens, zooming through the days. When this pandemic is past I look forward to hand delivering both paintings, meeting Henry, and – finally – hearing his voice.
‘It’s like you saw an intimate moment when he came in from work; strange, but amazing’
Henry was working long days and far too busy to sit staring at a small screen, while I stared back at him