As the year comes to an end, I’m delighted to receive the news that my portrait of the artist Michael Kane has been acquired by the National Gallery. This is the first time they’ve acquired one of my works, and when I mentioned it to a friend he said it’s now a part of history - a work for everyone in the country forever. I hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms before, and it means a lot.
It can take a surprising amount of proofs to get a photograph to look exactly as it needs to be, and when I took the shot of them all laid out I asked master printer Jim Butler from Inspirational Arts if he’d like to be included. “Only if you want a picture of me crying” he replied. The finished print is 1 meter high, and was worth all the trouble - thanks Jim!
