Portrait Gallery

In our ancestral home, we have a portrait gallery with paintings of family members going back generations.

It’s my Gran’s front room and, because I’m doing my Art GCSE, she gets me to paint their pictures from photos and she puts them in gilt frames from Wilco and my Dad hangs them up for her.

I wanted to do them in different styles - Picasso or Matisse - but she insists on them all being “proper’ oil paintings. By which she means Gainsborough or Rembrandt. I do them in acrylics and she pays me ten pounds for each of them. And she’s not shy about sending them back if she thinks I haven’t got them right.

This is her here. Not the one that I did for her. I did this one for me. She was so young and lovely in the photo - I mean, she’s lovely now but she was beautiful then.