My selection is quite unfair, I want to make that absolutely clear. The Discerning Eye is a peculiar exhibition, wonderful in its way for showing (up?) the taste and foibles of individual selectors as for the opportunity it provides for the known and unknown to exhibit their work side by side, all cut down to size, as it were.

So there isn’t the usual majority vote from the panel, the procedure with which I am so familiar from years of selecting for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Even that entirely democratic process can result in injustice. Good works sometimes slip through the net while mediocre remain. But at least a degree of defence is provided against bias and cronyism.

Here, I make no bones of the fact that my six invited artists are well known to me, indeed a couple are close friends from my student days at the Slade; others are admired mentors. I am grateful to each of them for adding their lustre. All are figurative, as in my choice from the open submission. My prerogative: I find figurative work more deeply satisfying than any other.

I detect the use and effect of photography in some works but on the whole I have favoured those that rely more on the naked eye (and heart). Sadly, there seemed to be precious few such amongst the huge 2000 plus send in. What a shame.

Painting from life, at its best, is incredibly exciting. So many figurative works today, especially from the young, rely on photographs as their only source material. I'm often asked when painting a portrait, "Wouldn't it be much easier to do it from a photograph?"

"What is 'it'?" I ask.

If 'it' is using my brain to select information collected with my own two eyes from the constantly-changing patterns in the 3-D world "out there" with which to construct a unique 2-D image, then a dead little scrap of a photograph is no use to me at all!

Some artists use photography intelligently as a tool but I have tried here to choose works that have not lost sight of our richly human response to the real world. The sheer impossibility of adequately describing our visual experience perhaps explains why greatness is in short supply. But it leads, positively, to the hugely enjoyable diversity of these works, each of which will repay a lifetime's scrutiny.

Take one home and SEE.

 

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