From learning to sculpt in a virtual studio to charting changes in cosmetic surgery, for the Maddox Gallery Artist Of The Year, oils and canvas are just the beginning. This year, we mark the portraitist’s outstanding body of work
I like the background,” says Diane Yeo to her son, the portraitist Jonathan Yeo, GQ’s Maddox Gallery Artist Of The Year.
On the canvas, my breasts are luminous against the gloaming background, my triangle of electric fur directly at eye level. Focusing on the background is what I predict my own mother will do when she sees this and the four others Yeo has produced over six months.
Fortunately for Yeo’s mother and her husband, the former Conservative MP Timothy Yeo, who’s sitting to her right, I am, as of 20 minutes ago, fully clothed. Timothy looks briefly at the canvas before giving me an awkward hug. Jonathan is taking his parents out for dinner this evening, round the corner at The Chelsea Arts Club.
Art is not Jonathan’s father’s thing. But it’s his thing and in this studio we are surrounded by it. Nestled in a corner there’s an angelic Nicole Kidman smiling at something we can’t see. From another, shirtless Idris Elba flexes under the weight of his own shoulders. Somewhere up there is Erin O’Connor, Cara Delevingne, Kristin Scott Thomas, one of his two daughters, his wife (Shebah Ronay), Dennis Hopper, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Grayson Perry, Damien Hirst and several others that you might recognise from his 2013 solo exhibition, Jonathan Yeo Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery.
Yeo, at 47, has the energy of a tightly coiled spring and the movement of a slightly mischievous monkey. He is fun and flirtatious, a smattering of grey hair, a few creases around the eyes and natty spectacle choice the only hints that he’s soon to enter his sixth decade.
Once you’ve seen one of Yeo’s works, it’s easy to pick out the many others lining the walls of private members clubs and galleries: muted colour palette, variegated, textured backgrounds and the stylistically unfinished hair and bodies. You’ve definitely seen at least one of his works: if not a pregnant Sienna Miller, then perhaps Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood – used in an episode of House Of Cards– and if not one of the oils, then one of the collages made from old pornographic magazines. You might even have peered a little too closely at a portrait of George W Bush and found yourself alarmingly close to a collection of clitorises, penises and arseholes (Yeo pieced together the right tones from thousands of clippings of genitalia to interpret the face of a man who was once the most powerful in the world).
Currently, Yeo is, if not the most powerful, then certainly the most well-regarded portrait artist in the world, having already had several retrospectives, including the one at the National Portrait Gallery.
Some sitters, such as Jude Law, ask him not to make them look beautiful, as they want something that shows who they are, not how they make their living. With his second portrait of Tony Blair, the muted palette sets off a blood-red poppy on his lapel – a reference to his “foreign policy” as Yeo puts it. Despite Blair’s mistake, or perhaps because of it, Yeo is complimentary about his sitter. “Blair was a pretty class act. People are very vitriolic about him – they were taken in. I never bought that, partly because I was brought up around politics, I suppose. People are much more complicated than that. No one is straightforward. I didn’t feel duped by him [regarding Iraq], but he made a monumental fuck-up.”
David Cameron was just a lowly leader of the opposition when Yeo painted him. “He was a bit laid-back. Maybe Brexit wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t. When I visited him at work it was like a sixth-form common room. Cameron had his trainers on and feet up on the table, joking with George Osborne. But when anyone would come in the room they would sit up straight.” The resulting portrait is of a man on a mission. How would he show him now? An EU badge on his lapel? “I’d maybe not make him look so purposeful.”
I’m not a complete stranger to Yeo – two of my sisters have married good friends of his – and when he said he was looking for a life model, I swung by the studio to talk it over. Around that time he was getting to grips with virtual reality. He was one of a group of artists who had been invited by Google to San Francisco to see what use artists might have for it. He ended up bringing the tech back to play with. It’s a proper setup that can locate your position, allowing you to move around in the digital world. There are controllers you hold in your hands to manipulate virtual matter in, well, virtual reality.
Yeo was running late for our meeting, so I had a go (with his assistant Reuben’s request that I avoid running into furniture). I experimented with Tilt Brush, Google’s VR answer to Microsoft Paint. You can construct abstract wavy scenes with a flick of the wrist or dance around to create large, gravity-defying sculptures that trace your movement through the virtual world.
Messing around in VR is all well and good, but once you’ve removed the headset you forget all about it, which is the problem that Yeo had. “I was interested in how you could use this as a tool rather than a piece of paper.” Nonetheless, he was impressed. “I was amazed by how much further along the tech had got than I thought. I tried a more basic VR headset a year or two before. It was a ‘wow’ experience for 30 seconds, but wore off after that.”
Yeo regularly mentions that he didn’t go to art school. Success, if not financial reward, came in his early twenties, after a cubist-style portrait of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid campaigner, and more commissions quickly followed. At the time, Yeo was recovering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “I think Huddleston sat for me because he felt sorry for me,” he says. Occasionally, he says he didn’t go to art school in a way that sounds almost boastful – look where he is without it. (“They don’t teach you any technical skills there. They’re too nice.”) And sometimes he sounds more mournful, as he didn’t have the chance to experiment with as many different media as he would have liked.
But he’s been making up for it ever since. He spent a year figuring out how Google’s Tilt Brush could be useful and discovered, “quite by chance”, that he could put a 3-D scan of his head into the virtual space with him. (“It was a lightbulb moment. I could work from that for reference.”) Put another way: Yeo’s first experience of sculpting was in VR.
Google wanted any art that had been made in the Tron-like landscape to stay there. But this seemed bizarre to Yeo. Why not get it into the real world? The resulting work, cast in bronze, was a key piece of the recent exhibition in the Royal Academy, From Life, which marked 250 years of its existence.
But Yeo’s interest in VR goes beyond art. One of his daughters has scoliosis and is just at the age when she will require potentially life-changing, but very risky, surgery. Yeo has been meeting doctors to see if using a combination of 3-D scanning, sculpting in VR and 3-D printing could work to produce a very accurate brace for a patient to wear to correct the spinal curve.
A family member is never far away on the days I sit for him and their portraits are generally hanging on the studio walls. It was while drawing his then girlfriend, now wife on holiday in his early twenties, that he realised he wanted to concentrate on portraiture.
During our first meeting, Yeo had a box in front of him full of copies of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus, a seminal work that lays out what’s in store for the human race with the growth of AI technology. From the way he was talking about the book, it sounded like he’d been giving copies out to anyone who sat still long enough.
Yeo is morbidly fascinated by big data and the internet. He’s both repulsed and curious about the morally dubious ways Facebook and other internet-based companies make their money from spying on us. He wondered: what can a portrait artist add to a conversation about surveillance and privacy? And so, Yeo is planning an interactive installation that will piece together a “digital portrait” of what is known about an individual to draw their attention to how vulnerable they are on the internet. A person will sit in a photo booth, have their heads 3-D scanned and all the information about them that can be found on the internet will be displayed in real time. The team behind Blade Runner 2049’s special effects are working on the aesthetics. Yeo won’t say where exactly all this data will be pulled from, but does reveal that the software he’s using is so new its functionality has yet to be decided, let alone programmed.
Yeo says he suffers from people not knowing what to make of him when they find out the range of things he does. “Portraiture keeps it together. Everyone understands what a portrait artist does, so when I start a new project, people understand where I’m coming from.” Occasionally, he even gives the impression of being somewhat apart from his fellow artists. During one sitting on a Friday evening, an artist was explaining an installation involving attaching glowing LEDs to pigeons and how it was meant to demonstrate the chaotic reality of nature... or something. “That’s right. Try and rationalise it,” Yeo mumbled. “Artists.”
The next logical step for Yeo’s work – paint portraiture that captures a deep essence of a person, digital portraiture that captures what others know about them – was his most recent exhibition at The Bowes Museum, Skin Deep, exploring how appearance converges with personality.
The series features scenes from the operating theatre of face-lifts and boob jobs. He’s been producing the works over the past ten years and has seen a trend in people undergoing elective cosmetic surgery to ask for more natural changes, rather than the pneumatic Nineties glamour-model look. He’s also observed how cosmetic surgery affects a person’s psyche. In “Mammary Augmentation I”, a diptych shows the posture of a woman before and after she’s had work on her breasts. “Endobrow Lift II” depicts a woman’s face with her eyes closed – black lines indicate where incisions will be made around the brow area. It’s a beautiful face and the viewer is asked to wonder why.
He puts it down to the search for the perfect selfie, which is hampered by the distorting effect of camera phones (taking a photo very close always creates distortion – so unless you’re using a selfie stick your nose will look bigger). We haven’t, thinks Yeo, ever looked at ourselves so much and so inaccurately.
Another Friday, another sitting. When we break I shrug on my fluffy dressing gown and pad across the wooden floor to see how the canvas is developing. In this pose, I’ve got my hips square to the audience, one arm covering my bosom, the other draped on a bannister. I’m standing straighter than in previous poses – I’ve been drinking less and exercising, and it shows. The face is just a few loose brushstrokes, but I’d recognise it anywhere.
