In September I drove to Brighton to draw Ami Bouhassane, the tenth author collaborating with me on this project. The tenth out of twenty, that is. Such milestones are irresistible: halfway there, I kept telling myself in the car. At this stage I did not appreciate the true scale of the undertaking in emotional terms: the pressure I would feel as deadlines drew closer, the sense of being exposed.
Gradually I would realise this project wasn’t just about painting portraits, it was about staying calm and focused over the long haul. I’m not sure I would have managed it without Henrietta Rodgers, who besides coordinating my various meetings and sittings always managed to stiffen my back with her positive attitude. I also leaned heavily on Anthony Hopkins’ inspirational advice: believe in what you want to do, believe in it even if you don’t believe in it, play the game of belief.
But driving to meet Ami that September, all this still lay in the future. I was just glad to be halfway there.
Ami is the granddaughter of the photographer Lee Miller and the artist Roland Penrose. As a trustee of Miller’s archives, and co-director of the gallery in Miller’s home, she is closely involved with that great woman’s legacy. Ami’s book, Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends and Recipes, shows how Miller found a new creative outlet in cooking following her traumatic experiences as a photojournalist in the Second World War.
Arriving at Ami’s house, I found her presence relaxed and welcoming. We visited several rooms discussing options for the portrait. The final choice was between a green assemblage of sofa, curtains and throw – she mentioned that green is her favourite colour, and I said it was mine as well – or the kitchen she calls her orange room. Here an orange floor and rug accompanied a granite counter and metal stool, whose reflective base I had already started painting in my mind.
We chose the kitchen, which seemed appropriate given that Ami’s first book was about cooking. She sat on the stool with her elbows on the counter, wearing black leggings and a black jumper – everyday garments chosen to illustrate that clothes are not important to her. Studying Ami’s toes as they curled over the stool’s footrest, I noticed an unexpected profusion of details: one toe wrapped in a plaster, another adorned with a ring, and a third showing a bruised nail, clearly the result of a bad stub. In both hands she held a cup with Wild Child emblazoned on it, a teabag label hanging over the side.
I was just observing the subtle twist of Ami’s pose when I realised that, after sharpening my pencils that morning (literally and figuratively), I had forgotten to pack them back into my bag. Ami duly dug out some colouring pencils for me, and once I had recovered from my embarrassment we got underway.
During the drawing, Ami’s husband came back from a football match (he had sadly lost) and treated me to the story of their first meeting. Ami had been sent to collect him at the airport, she just eighteen and he just twenty. It was love at first sight, and they married soon after, even though they could only communicate in broken French (his native languages were Arabic and Berber). The beauty of getting married so young, Amy remarked, is that now she is still in her forties and can enjoy the company of her adult children.
I started the portrait in late November, drawing the outlines with ultramarine acrylic paint, and initially forming a background from a staircase and hanging light. As the image evolved I took these elements out again, replacing them with something else I had seen at Ami’s house, a drawing her son Tariq made as a child. Such compositional puzzles have been a regular feature of this series, since the limited canvas format has forced me to think hard about the elements presented to me, deciding what to include and what to ignore or simplify.
In September 2022, exactly a year after our first sitting, Ami came for the second. As usual, the portrait was complete apart from the face. Ami was delighted to find Tariq’s juvenile painting in the background (he is a lawyer now, she said). Likewise, she was glad the orange rug had made the cut, a hand-woven Berber piece she and her husband bought in Algeria years ago.
Once Ami had sat down, I pulled my own seat close to hers for a more intimate perspective, something I find useful when refining the face. After improving the skin tones and adding a few freckles, I forced myself to down brushes. Though detail is often what makes a subject’s presence in the portrait vivid, too much of it can have the opposite effect, making the painting feel precious and overworked.
