Twenty Six Portraits

Julian Opie

Hirofumi is the owner of a Tokyo-based fashion company. He asked if I would collaborate with his company to design some clothes. A group of designers from the firm came to visit me in London. They were very open about what I could do. They showed me clothes from an earlier collaboration they had made with an artist that I like a lot and the quality was great. I had some anxieties about combining my work with someone elses product but I had previously made a t-shirt that carried an image of someone taking off their t-shirt and I wanted to develop this idea.

Once the project was underway my Japanese gallery told me that Hirofumi wanted to commission a portrait of himself and his wife, Hijiri.

By this time I had stopped doing commissioned portraits. I began the portrait series with the idea that anyone would be a good model. Every person could equally well show that a simple sign for their face could bring their individual presence into the picture, that everyone could be their own classic type. I started by drawing friends and family and anyone who happened to visit the studio. Then some people asked if I would draw them as a commission and for some time this became my principal starting point for a portrait. It is relatively unusual to find an un-commissioned Old Master portrait and this hides the fact that a commissioned one has a very particular character. It doesn't just affect one's understanding of the painting and the relationship one feels with the sitter but also seems to show in the poses and expressions. I find this interesting and it helps in my attempt to make these images feel like familiar, museum portrait paintings. On top of this the models paid me.

However the commissions rather snowballed, they take quite a long time to produce and I soon had a bothersome backlog of commissions. Parents would be picky about the way their children looked and my role as hired portraitist often felt uncomfortable. I tried raising the commission fee but eventually just told everyone that I had stopped. Anyway, I had over a hundred portraits to play with and I was beginning to want to move away from the tight format of the close-up.

I had been making animated films of full-length figures in motion for some years and on a few occasions I also made films of people's heads. Sometimes the models would blink or smile, in other films they would nod or shake their heads. These days large screens are only available in a stretched format and this is inconvenient when using the fairly square portrait format that comes as a result of drawing a head. In the past I had cropped the sides of the head but the other obvious possibility was to show more of the body. Drawing more of the body involved a lot of new challenges and possibilities: what to make of the model's pose? what to do with their hands?

I am crazy about Japanese woodblock prints, particularly the work of Kitagawa Utamaro. He is most famous for depicting women and I made drawings of some of the poses. I also borrowed some male poses from early Renaissance painters such as Giovanni Bellini and Fra Angelico. I imagined drawing someone in these poses as a three-quarter length portrait. I thought this would place the image into a certain painterly context instead of simply showing a person standing there; a bit like dressing up on stage. I hoped the reference to historical, classic poses, would have the effect of distancing the models, putting them into a more fictional role. The props involved also provided a visual diversion from confronting the model full on, like a joke at an awkward moment.

The possibility of using a Japanese couple seemed interesting, so I accepted Hirofumi's request and set up a date for them both to visit.

I had been working on a series of talking portraits. The idea was to have a face animated in such a way that the eyes appeared to blink on a computer screen and combine this with the voice of the person relating a series of facts about themselves. I had recorded a young woman's answers to my scripted questions, cut the recording into a series of simple statements and then had them play randomly from the computer. I got the idea from my daughter's talking doll. I wanted to try a version of this in Japanese, so I asked Hirofumi and Hijiri if they would participate. I think they were a little hesitant, but they agreed. With the help of an interpreter I asked them simple questions such as: "where were you born?", "do you have any pets?", "what is your job?". I also experimented with more personal questions such as: "were you good at school?" and: "what do you vote?". But I generally found that the answers to the simple questions were most effective and that the answers did not come across as impersonal.

Hirofumi, who speaks less English than Hijiri, found the process difficult; we were both shy. Hijiri, an actress, was more light about it and, though very self deprecatory, was quite happy to try different ways of answering the same questions and play around with the idea.

That I couldn't understand the statements confused me and, although I continued to record them and the subsequent models, the project began to fall apart. I tried to combine a drawing of someone breathing and blinking with the sound of her singing but lost heart in this project too. Eventually I shelved the idea and concentrated on the accidents of the outfits and poses to accompany the blinking eyes. Hirofumi's fashion sense provided me with interesting outfits to draw and to set off the classical poses that I asked him to adopt. Strangely he was a more relaxed model than Hijiri. She remained very stiff and self-conscious in every pose but she proved very enjoyable to draw. There was another drawing of her smoking a cigarette but I somehow lost it while transferring files from one computer to another. I used the various works that came out of the session to make an exhibition in Tokyo. There was a billboard size inkjet painting of "Hirofumi with staff" and smaller silkscreen paintings of Hijiri. I had planned to show the two blinking portraits (without soundtrack) side by side, but in the context of the other work this proved distracting and so I split them up.

A television chat show had been using horrible copies of my portraits to accompany each of their guest-stars, despite all my efforts to get them to stop. When Channel 4 asked if I would take part in an art programme on self-portraiture I saw a chance to put things right, so I accepted. It involved them filming me while I made a self-portrait. I wanted to make a portrait that appeared to be breathing and it seemed that using myself would be a good solution as I could control all the movements precisely. Some years earlier I had played a lot of Tomb Raider computer games. If you leave the controls alone Lara Croft stops walking but appears to breathe heavily. This simple movement gives the illusion that she is still active, that the scene is still live. It seemed to animate everything around her as well. It was difficult to concentrate while dealing with the camera crew and answering the presenters' questions. As is usual with TV there was some faking but they filmed me filming myself and then returned later to film me drawing some of the frames and viewing the finished work.

For this kind of film I draw a base image and then animate parts of it. The base image can be used in a number of ways. I made a smallish version using silkscreen on spray-painted wooden board. Silkscreen is usually associated with multiple prints but it is still one of the best ways to make a precise, flat painting, even if you are making only one image. By printing on a wooden board the whole thing becomes an object, rather like the traditional oil on canvas portraits that I was mimicking. Silkscreens become difficult on a big scale and the cut-out vinyl system that I often use does not provide the subtle colours that seemed more appropriate for these more complicated drawings. Inkjet printing on canvas has a rather thin, superficial quality that I don't like, but I found a company in Manchester that inkjets on to paper and then presses the image from the paper on to nylon cloth. The effect is a much more saturated colour that does not seem to sit on the surface but be in the cloth, as if it were a dyed silk scarf. I use this system to make the large versions which are two and a half metres high, big enough to put the head well above the viewer, like a picture in a palace.

It was an unpleasant experience using my own image to draw. I sometimes have the feeling that all the portraits are really self-portraits but actually staring at my own image for hours and using my own name when referring to the works later made me uncomfortable. Even looking at the final drawings makes me a little uncomfortable and it was difficult to distinguish this from the feeling I have when a drawing is not working. As a result I spent a long time fiddling with minor adjustments on the face.

Ashley first contacted me through my website. He explained that he and his wife, Anya, liked to collect art, but only of images of themselves as a couple. He asked if I would be willing to do a double portrait of them as a commission. Normally I would have explained that for one thing I had stopped doing commissioned portraits and secondly that I had not been able to find a way to put two different people into a single picture, except for a portrait of a pair of monkeys that I had made some years earlier. Somehow the relationship between the people becomes too important and visually one's eye keeps jumping back and forth in an uncomfortable way, refusing to take in the image as a whole. However I had a plan to make a pair of conversing portrait films on two separate screens and asked Ashley if this project might interest him. Ashley and Anya agreed to come to the studio for a day and pose for me on the understanding that a number of different works might come out of the project and that they would wait and see what, if anything, they wanted.

Ashley is a city banker and keen sportsman. He arrived in a pristine suit and tie with a casual, weekend outfit as a back up. I had prepared myself by gathering together my drawings of Old Master paintings that I had made for the previous portrait project with a Japanese couple. I started with Ashley, using only the stills, digital camera. He posed with books and files in his hands and with a staff, but in the end the images that worked best of him were those where he simply stood with arms crossed or hands in pockets, somewhat sideways to the viewer and looking slightly down at you. It might have made more sense to show Ashley, the banker, in his suit, but the mix of quite tough leather jacket and formal city shirt seemed better to describe him and presented new opportunities for drawing, particularly the shine on the jacket and the stripes of the shirt, both of which act to further define his shape and give a lot of detail without really complicating the drawing. While I photographed I kept fairly silent. Some models need a lot of calming and, in a way so do I, and chatting helps, but Ashley was very calm, even rigid. It wasn't necessary to take a lot of photos of each pose as he didn't fidget or grimace.

I knew photographing Anya would be more demanding, if only due to the number of outfits she had brought. She was also a good model but much more active and chatty, laughing and telling stories all the while. I tried to be organized and go through a number of similar poses in each outfit, with hair up and then the same with hair down, but when you added in the shoes and accessories, the variations became endless and I just took what I could. I didn't really notice her earrings at the time, but they proved very useful later when I came to make films of the two of them. The plan was to make films of both of them in which they appear to blink. To do this I take a photo and then take the same photo but asking the models to close their eyes. I then draw some intervening stages and the model appears to blink. My friend and animator, Daniel, then loops the frames and runs them on an algorithmic (that's what he calls it) random system which makes the computer decide when she blinks. At this stage I realized that Anya's dangly earrings would probably be moving slightly. It was fairly simple to draw a series of earrings which, when animated, makes the earrings appear to sway back and forth.

Perhaps because Anya was an actress, she seemed to enjoy finding different poses and trying out many combinations of clothes. Her husband waited patiently down-stairs until we were finished and then they swapped and I sat Ashley down and began the next phase of the project. I had a list of simple questions developed from the questions I had asked Hirofumi and Hijiri. Ashley seemed more nervous at this stage. He didn't really seem to understand what I was looking for. I wanted a series of statements that were deadpan information in the voice of the sitter, but Ashley had prepared answers that were amusing and gave me too much detail. We persevered however and then moved on to Anya. Anya was much more relaxed, though surprisingly shy and modest.

Sorting through the hundreds of photos was a challenge. I sort the photos into 'great', 'good' and 'bad' files and then I junk the 'bad' ones. I tell myself I will also consider the 'good' ones but actually only usually deal with the 'great'. No matter how many photos I take, there always seem to be missing possibilities or slight problems with each pose. The hair is behind one ear, the straps are irregular, or I cropped too much, or she is not in full focus. Really, one could re-photograph at this stage but I don't.

Having photographed a number of people to make these new, three-quarter length portraits it occurred to me that I could use images from earlier photo-shoots taken for different purposes. I sifted through photos of my favourite, recent models. Very few images seemed likely to work, perhaps because I had been focusing on different things. Kiera is a London based artist and one-time child minder for my first daughter. Over the years I have drawn her for various projects including wall drawings, statues, films and paintings. Her long, slim legs inspired a number of poses including a series suggesting that she was adjusting her shoes.

I found Bijou via a modelling agency. She and a male model, Alex, were the first professional models I ever used. I needed images of naked male and female figures for an architectural project and felt it was too much to ask of people I knew. Bijou proved to be a great model and I made a large series of paintings and a film of her undressing. In this pose she is actually removing her underwear but, in the end, that information got cropped out of the image, as it seemed awkward and crude when drawn in this way. Bijou was not wearing earrings and there was no pendant on Kiera's necklace. I added these so that I could later animate them swinging. I can now animate someone blinking without filming the actual blink. It turns out that I have to draw the movement as much faster than it is in reality.

I have made even more works depicting Monique, a business woman and art collector from Switzerland. She and her husband commissioned me to make portraits of themselves and their three children. Some years later Monique asked me to make a second portrait of herself. I had an idea to make a kind of mega-portrait, to draw her from many angles, in many ways, in many outfits and somehow combine the resulting images. On my instructions Monique arrived with an array of clothes and I took hundreds of photos and hours of video footage. I made a lot of paintings and three films. The first had her walking in a swimsuit. The second film was a close-up portrait of her face. Every now and then she smiles, frowns, blinks, or raises her eyebrows, in a random order. The third combined all the images I had drawn in a kind of slide show. I later realized that I could use the 'changing expressions' film in combination with a three-quarter length portrait drawn in the more detailed style I was now using. I eventually found a pose where the heads matched. Although the head is much smaller in this second film, the slight facial movements seem to animate the whole.

Ruth is an art collector living in Geneva. She had bought a few of my full-length people paintings and asked my gallery if I would make some similar paintings of her. I asked if I could have some photos of her and if she smoked. She did smoke and she also had long smooth hair. These were both qualities that I was looking for. I talked to Ruth on the phone, explaining what I had in mind and what I would need her to bring to the studio.

She turned up with many bags of clothes and accessories and a new pack of cigarettes. I have an upstairs, sky-lit studio, put aside for photography. Even when people are working below, it feels calm and private. There is something quite intimate about the process of a photo-shoot. Invariably I end up chatting freely with models as we work, laughing and sharing stories and opinions. Often I never see the model again but at the time it feels, to me at least, as if we get to know each other a bit. We tried hair up, hair down, glasses, dark glasses, jewellery, underwear, swimming costume, dresses and topless, all with and without cigarettes. I photographed her standing and filmed her walking on my running machine. The previous year I had made a film of a model turning through three hundred and sixty degrees. To do this I had an electric turn-table made. Ruth stood on this and slowly turned as I took my photos. This gave me the choice of many angles on each pose.

I ended up with five images of Ruth, all smoking. I intend to make them into films if I can animate smoke successfully. I have made a series of portraits where a small amount of movement helps to bring the figure to life. There is no story, just a sense of time. I didn't notice that Ruth was wearing a watch throughout the shoot, but it offered the possibility of animating the second hand to further the sense that the image was 'live'. I considered making the watch actually work and tell the real time, but in the end this seemed unnecessary.

I have used the five images of Ruth in a number of ways: computer films, silkscreens, large scale inkjet canvases, and I made a set where the abstraction is taken a step further, in the manner of the full-length figures that I have drawn.

I feel I may have finished the three-quarter length series, though one or two other projects might come up. I have never managed to draw more than one person in a portrait but, with more help from Utamaro, and remembering the monkey double portrait, I realized that maybe drawing people who [that] looked alike or had some obvious connection might work. I have started by drawing a group portrait of three sisters.