A-trained artist clinches prestigious portrait award
Patrick Burnett

Craig Wylie, a Zimbabwean-born artist who studied in South Africa before moving to the United Kingdom, has gone from obscurity to stardom after winning the prestigious BP Portrait Award in London.
In what is considered to be the most prestigious portrait competition in the world that showcases the best of contemporary portrait painting, Wylie, 35, walked away with top honours for a two-metre high oil on canvas study of his girlfriend, Katherine Raw.
In clinching the prize, Wylie beat 1,726 other entries and won £25,000 and a commission from the National Portrait Gallery in London worth a further £4,000.
Fifty-five of the 1,726 entries were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London prior to the winners being announced on June 16, with the exhibition hailed as being of the highest quality ever. Wylie's painting was tipped by some as a clear winner even before the prize was announced.
Speaking from London, where he has a studio in Hackney Wick in east London, Wylie said the award was "excellent" from a personal perspective, although he was still coming to grips with what it would mean for his career.
Since moving to London in the late 1990s he has exhibited widely and placed 3rd in the Young Artists Award of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2001 and 2nd in the same award a year later.
But the BP award is by far the most prestigious, although having won it he points out that he is "not really a portrait painter", at least not in the sense that he only wants to do portrait commissions.
He sees portraits as a platform that he felt he could do well on and the BP prize as something "I always had a shot at".
With being known a large part of making it in the London art scene, Wylie admits the publicity associated with the prize certainly hasn't done his career any harm, but is modest about the achievement.
"Whether I'm up there or not is another question," he says.
The expression on the face of the portrait which won him the prize, known as K, was described by The Guardian in the following terms: "I know you're my boyfriend and I love you very much and I know I agreed to sit for you and I think you'll find I'm not moving but I'm really not happy here and, frankly Craig, I'd rather be somewhere else."
But Wylie, who was born in 1973 in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, rejects the description, saying he tried to talk the journalist out of it.
"It's quite a complicated painting and it's full of quite a few different messages. I'm not sure there is a look of boredom and not wanting to be there. There is definitely a challenge and I thought it was about vulnerability," he says.
In a statement on K issued after the award he explained that: “On a formal level this work is about contradiction. I wanted to use a strictly classical composition, formal, even stiff, and then try to subvert the stillness these tenets imply. This internal friction between elements in the painting give it its quiet dynamism.”
The size of the work was intentional: “Enlargement creates for the viewer both a confrontational vortex and a sacrifice to scrutiny as the viewer can step into the paintings personal space in a way not possible with smaller works. Gigantism also affects the psychological edge of the sitter. On one level the viewers intrusion into the sitters emotional state is tacitly accepted, on another it is positively rebuffed.”
It was a case of third-time lucky for Wylie when it came to K, which he had started on two separate occasions, the first in 2006, before completing the final version.
After completing the portrait, he said he had "not had much time with it" before it was sent for entry to the competition. It was two and a half months before the two were reunited.
"When I saw it again I was pleasantly surprised and thought it wasn't too bad," he says.
Wylie studied at Rhodes University in Grahamstown between 1992 and 1996, graduating with distinction with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
He initially began studying journalism, but from his second year onwards "art took over" in the place where, like many Rhodes graduates, he remembers having an "excellent time".
A move back to Zimbabwe after graduation and a show in his home country could not prevent the pull to London.
"I just wanted to come and see what was going on and I thought as far as art is concerned it's the place to be," he says.
He doesn't have plans to return to Zimbabwe or South Africa on a permanent basis, but does not rule out spending more time on the continent "especially during the winter".
The move to London was not easy. Although he had money from a show in Zimbabwe, when that disappeared "it was a bit awkward".
"To find representation is quite difficult. There are a lot of galleries, but there is so much competition."
He did odd jobs for a short period of time but quickly realised that he would never be able to paint if he did "crappy jobs" and so he lived clandestinely in his rented studio space and "cracked on with it".
Other than painting portraits, he says he "just wants to get on with my thing", which involves a variety of projects that include working from live models and combining them with objects like fridges, broken chairs or suit cases.
He is also working with images taken from the internet and blown up in size, one of which is taken from a news report on Zimbabwe and shows a man lying on his back with an oxygen mask over his face – a clear commentary on the state of his home country.
His mother and some friends are still in Zimbabwe and the last time he visited was in October.
"It's just dreadful and it's really a crying shame,” he says about the situation under Mugabe, “All I can do really from here is make a small contribution in terms of finances. It's sad."
For artists planning the move to London, Wylie points out that it's a tough and expensive city, but does have its benefits.
"I guess you just have to stick to a level of belief and see your projects through as well as you can and then keep pushing, trying to find the openings and chasing them down and ploughing through the opportunities that are available. It's a question of perseverance I guess," he says.