Thomas Lawrence

So I was listening to this great BBC series about the Regency period by Lucy Worsley while I was coloring in princesses for my latest children's masterpiece, and there was a longish bit about the great portraitist of the age, Thomas Lawrence —

Sexy... Sexy!

— who himself quite liked to color in princesses, and in fact, was Sir Joshua Reynolds' successor of as the prime English painter of the wealthy and the powerful.

As usual, I was filled with admiration mared with visceral envy at anyone who could so stylishly render not only a good likeness (which I am able to do, almost convincingly, rather more often than the proverbial monkey is able to bang out the complete Shakespeare on his iMac...), but also somehow catch the sitter's personality: their shifting mood, their fleeting bodily and psychological presence, the life flickering out at you from the subtle, layered depths of the canvas...

(When I wish upon a star... Well, it's usually to do with sex, but I do sometimes remember to include the portrait thing.)

Anyways, then Lucy Worsley mentioned the contemporary artist Jonathan Yeo, who, according to her, when he is not painting fashionably morbid plastic surgery-themed stuff, or making ironic collages with pornographic magazines, is supposed to be the current equivalent: the trendy representer of the great and the good.

And I was casually struck, when looking at the two sets of images side by side, by how limp and without vitality the contemporary works seem. How much they suffer from the comparison! How much their etiolated blandness, their lazy derivation from photography, their self-conscious flatness somehow conspire to seal their mediocrity. And it seems to me that this is not just a question of talent or inspiration: I don't mean to pick on this particular artist. They are certainly technically competent and well crafted works. They are no doubt the fruit of earnest striving... But they are blighted.

We are drowning in images, and we struggle to find meaning, to find connection. Rather than attempting to transcend this, I think pictures like this are merely symptomatic of our contemporary difficulty. They are headshots or magazine pictorials dressed up as a paintings, for the purpose of status assertion... An ersatz: common, meretricious, basically humourless — decorative elements to hang above the Italian brushed steel and white leather couch...