This project took me to many new places, but few were as moving or unexpected as the long-forgotten place I stumbled across en route to my meeting with Rosie Boycott. It was November, and I was walking to Rosie’s apartment from Paddington station in west London. After a few blocks I found myself on Craven Road, the street where I rented a grubby apartment with my family almost forty years ago, during one of our first stays in the UK.
That was a difficult period for me, living in an unfamiliar city, more or less alone with my three small children during the daytime. I had never been back to Craven Road since, and seeing it now I realised how many different lives we live in a lifetime. Where is that young woman who spent her afternoons pushing swings in Kensington Gardens? Maybe she is still haunting that neighbourhood; that is how it felt to me.
Pulling myself away from these memories, I continued towards Rosie’s street. Here I found rows of trees glowing with autumn colours, and clouds reflected in the upper-storey windows of neoclassical apartment buildings.
Baroness Rosie Boycott is a distinguished journalist and author, who has edited no less than three national newspapers, including the Express and Independent, as well as the men’s magazine Esquire. She is also a busy woman, so I got to work on the drawing soon after arriving at her elegant apartment. We decided a bold patterned sofa in the living room would be ideal for the portrait, the window behind it providing a soft light through sheer curtains. Rosie wore a deep burgundy and plum ensemble from Issey Miyake, together with blue jeans. She crossed her legs and propped her head against her fist, which created a small dimple on her cheek.
I was quieter than usual during this sitting, no doubt still reeling from my unexpected trip down memory lane. But the atmosphere was calm and meditative, especially after Rosie’s Labrador Fred came over and fell asleep at her feet. Though it was a short session, I managed to leave with two drawings and a quick tour of Rosie’s art collection.
Wanting to make the most of my train fare, I headed to John Sandoe Books in Chelsea after the sitting. There I discovered a little pamphlet written by the potter Edmund de Waal, which was only available as a gift to regular customers. So I treated this an excuse to pick up some art books, including a biography of Oskar Kokoshka and a volume about Ludwig Meidner, and when I went to pay the shop assistant obligingly slipped the de Waal pamphlet into my bag. Not for the first time, I left wondering how I became so obsessed with books, to the point where they have taken over a large and growing portion of my living space.
I started on Rosie’s portrait towards the end of November. My plan was to structure the composition around the patterned sofa, which took up half the pictorial space and created three margins in which the other elements could be balanced. I was very much looking forward to painting the colourful designs on the upholstery, aiming for a bold passage across the centre of the canvas. With this in mind I used stand oil to make the paint a little heavier and more gloopy, allowing for more dynamic brush strokes.
One inspiration for this approach was Suzanne Valadon’s 1916 painting Nude Sitting on a Sofa, where the striped couch plays a similar anchoring role in the composition. Likewise, Lucian Freud’s masterful paintings of models on sofas are never far from my mind, especially Benefit Supervisor Resting (1994). When I consider the lushness of Freud’s paint, and his careful observation of every inch of fabric, I have to reach for Philip Guston’s definition of a profound painting: “It’s like a gong sounding – it puts you in a state of reverberation.”
I felt less confident about the space behind the sofa. Eventually I decided to suggest the sheer curtain and window, providing a source for the light playing on the little pleats and folds of Rosie’s garments. Fred was not easy to paint, his black coat disappearing in the sofa’s shadow, so I tried to give his bulky body some definition with a few lilac and blueish highlights.
This is one of those paintings where I as the artist have a very different perspective to you, the viewer. It will always remind me of that moment, before the sitting, when I uncovered an earlier chapter of my life on Craven Road. In the bright and comfortable interior of Rosie’s apartment, I see reflected those fragmentary recollections of my past and the vivid feelings that accompanied them.
