Painting the Queen: A Portrait of Her Majesty

BIG BEN CHIMES

Whenever I begin any painting I've ever done, you start with

a mind's eye image of what is the ultimate goal of this painting.

And I have to say that I've never had an occasion

where my mind's eye image of the painting

was matched by the reality of the finished painting.

You never quite reach. You can get close to it -

but I've never gotten to the point

where I've achieved it or gone beyond the imagined.

It's the pinnacle as far as commissions go,

especially for a portrait painter.

The first contact was a letter from the Queen's representative.

And when I opened it I thought, "Aah... This is my chance!"

I probably did my first commissioned portrait about 40 years ago.

And even then when I was starting to get into portraiture,

I always dreamed of being able to paint the Queen one day.

-ARCHIVE:

-'..by placing on her head

'the six-pound King Edward's crown...'

I want the end result to have the feeling that the viewer

can connect with the Queen

not just on a ceremonial level

as the monarch of our country...

..but on a personal level as well.

I declare before you all

that my whole life, whether it be long or short,

shall be devoted to your service

and the service of our great imperial family

to which we all belong.

She's such an iconic figure too,

and she's a symbol for so many people.

She still, after all these years,

remains an enigmatic, personal character.

I want to get a feel for what kind of person inhabits this role

so that when I paint her portrait,

I can inject a little bit of that into the finished painting.

When I think back to the...you know, the attitude, like, 40 years ago

about what an artist could and could not be -

how it was such a difficult battle,

like to be fighting this constantly...

I never believed in the mid-20th century

that figurative painting was dead.

It didn't make any sense to me.

I thought it was terribly arrogant for critics and writers

and other artists to even um...

espouse that, because, you know,

people have been painting - drawing and painting images -

for about, you know, at least 35,000 years.

And most of that time has been spent on depicting things that they see.

It's a way of understanding your world, and the things that are most

important usually in one's world are the people that are around them.

Most early drawings that little wee kids do are faces.

You know, it starts with just like a round thing, then the eyes come in

and then there's a mouth and then there's a nose and ears and hair.

I think it's natural to want to paint people

and paint their faces.

As you start doing more of it, I started to realise

that this is probably the hardest thing

there is in the world of art to do.

In the visual world, I think that the one thing that human beings

know better than any other thing is the human face.

One thing I've discovered is that being a portrait painter,

once you've finished the painting, you literally in some cases

know the face better than the owner of the face.

Usually when I'm painting a picture of almost anyone,

I'll establish a personal relationship with them

right off the bat.

You know, I can't just sit down and ask the Queen the kind of questions

I would ask any other sitter,

because there's all kinds of protocol that has to be adhered to.

Ma'am, if you could just drop your wrist a little bit...

-This one?

-That's it.

Yes, this is...

CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS RAPIDLY

Thank you, ma'am.

-That was interesting, wasn't it?

-Indeed.

Very quick!

-Thank you, ma'am.

-Right. Bye.

-Goodbye, ma'am.

Oh, there it is.

Yeah...

I was in high school at the time, and I think it was

probably in the fall of 1968 and this new book came into the library.

And I was, you know, painting already in those days.

And I was really amazed at the stuff I saw, and it's this picture here.

What he's done, he's created space with the overlapping of one figure

to another, to another, to the trees, the landscape, the sky...

So there's actually deep space that the eye can follow through

from one side to the other.

In one way it looks very flat,

but then when you keep looking at it it looks very spatial as well.

And that was my epiphany. I thought, "That's the way I want to paint."

The young man is still only in his 20s.

I think he's one of the most brilliant young Canadian artists -

and he's working with realism.

But let's see what kind...

To know a little bit of our history is a good idea.

It's called The Grand Theft.

Now, the two little lead reliefs

on the couch behind the boys...

Jasper Johns, the very famous American pop artist,

did lead reliefs of light bulbs and of knees.

Those - those two...

are the reliefs of his own son.

Those two kids' knees... which he's juxtapositioned

and made to appear like Jasper Johns' lead reliefs.

It's totally unreal, that painting,

and yet it's realistic.

That's the enigmatic.

That's a game he's playing.

I paint the things that I'm most involved with -

the people around me, and the things that comprise my everyday life.

Pictures and books

and the history of art.

I think if you take direct aim at being innovative,

you'll probably miss.

I think if you compare yourself to the standards that have been set...

..throughout history,

then I think

you will come up with something original.

-Do you think this is...

-I like it. I like it very much.

I've got three heroes, in three different realms.

One is in painting - Piero della Francesca.

You know, Quattrocento Italian painter.

The other is the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright,

19th-20th century American architect.

And the other is the composer George Frideric Handel,

the German-English Baroque composer.

What ties them all together for me

is an emphasis on structure within their form,

and that's the kind of person I am.

I like any emotional content that my work has

to come out of the way the artwork is built.

For anyone in the arts,

if you don't have self-discipline, you're just not going to do it.

And part of that self-discipline is to have regimented routines.

And I don't know if that grows out of the way I make art

or the way I make art has grown out of my personality.

Structured thinking, in my case,

ends up having a kind of structured life.

My wife calls me the most boring man in the world.

That's because my life is so structured.

Like, I go to bed at the same time every night.

I get up at the same time. I have breakfast at the same time.

I have the same lunch every day.

Another one of my heroes is Alfred Hitchcock

and he used to wear this dark blue suit to the set every day.

And people would ask him,

"Why do you wear the same clothing every day when you go to work?"

He said, "The suit is the same, but the movies are all different."

And I feel the same way. The paintings are all different.

The predictability of my life

is like a foundation for everything else,

if you want to call it creativity, that springs from that.

When Jenny and I first started dating, she was my main model.

So I painted and drew her.

And then we had kids. I added the kids.

I used to joke in the early days that

one of the reasons I started painting the family,

because it was a way of using cheap models.

You know, these little kids, all you had to do was feed them.

They didn't demand any fees. So that's the way it started out.

But I like the idea of bringing these different worlds together,

you know, like family and artistic impulses,

-to make them part of the same thing.

-I don't like them. Daddy!

Jenny and I decided early on that she would stay home

and look after the kids.

So, you know, with a single income to bring up

a family of three kids, five people,

depending on one, especially an artist's, income -

I look back on it, it sounds insane.

Like, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.

Jenny never questioned my commitment to art

or the idea of creating art for the future.

I really appreciated that

because anyone else would have given up at some point.

We grew and developed together as a team.

I started doing little pencil sketches of...

This was actually done before the photo shoot,

just to try and set up that initial shoot.

So one of the reasons for starting with the small scale

is that you're seeing the total composition

and then gradually you're working your way up in scale.

So right now, these are nine inches by six inches.

The final painting is going to be nine feet by six feet.

What's happening inside my head is that I'm becoming more familiar

with the elements and the possibilities.

So that each time I do another version,

even if there are big changes made,

I kind of carry what I've learned.

I've built a lot of models over the years.

What I've done is I've gone to Rideau Hall and taken measurements

of certain rooms and brought them back here and created this room

that is part of a real room but I've turned it into an imaginary space.

I'm trying to teach not only myself

but the ultimate audience of the picture

that it really looks and feels like a real space.

I call this grid a geometric map of the rectangle.

Into this two-dimensional geometric grid,

I use what's often termed as projective geometry.

In other words, lines converging to a point.

You've got these two systems of geometry,

one that is depicting the surface

and the other is trying to depict space.

And I find the kind of interplay

between these two systems of geometry really, really fascinating.

One of the reasons for making a sculpture in this particular project

is the difficulty of access for the model.

Usually I'm able to see and be with the person I'm painting,

you know, reasonably easy access.

But with the Queen, it's been a little more difficult.

And so what I decided to do with her

was to do a carved bust of the Queen.

The basic forms of her face are there.

So it means that I can light this now.

So you can see that depending on where she is

in relation to the light,

the image changes quite dramatically...

..you know, and the expression changes too.

So this gives me...

So I can work with this lit the way I want to

and then work on her portrait.

I was the superintendent,

which is just a fancy name for a janitor, of Cliffside Plaza.

After I finished art college in 1973,

I approached the owners of the plaza

and I made them a proposal that if they gave me this space for free,

I would look after the building for them.

So I offered this to them and they went for it.

So I knew that if I came here

and did janitorial work there was no future in that.

There's no way you're going to become any more comfortable.

You're always going to be paid almost minimum wage and that was it.

So any future I had would be focused on the art career.

So my plan was to be here for five years.

So after five years I'd be successful and wealthy enough

I could build my own studio

and my career would just be up and running from there.

So after 15 years, I finally left.

The Globe and Mail used to be delivered here,

I think it was about 2:30 in the morning.

And the Saturday Globe and Mail was the issue

in which the art reviews would come out.

So more than once I'd be sweeping up early in the morning

and put my bag and broom down beside the Globe and Mail box,

put in my dime, go to the Entertainment section

and sure enough, there's a review of one of my shows in the paper,

talking about how successful I've been

and what a wonderful show it is and all.

When the reality is that I was sweeping out garbage here to get by.

One of my kind of personal rules about art making

is that it really doesn't matter what you do

but it really matters how you do it.

That's what's most important.

I think art is fundamentally

about the joy of making things

and communication.

Artists in general, and visual artists in particular,

are always spectators.

You draw your raw material from the world around you.

But because you do that,

it makes it very difficult to feel like you're part of that world,

because you have to recreate

the sense of the world through your artwork.

It makes you always feel like an outsider.

It's a very lonely kind of occupation too, because,

like, I've spent the better part of my life standing in one spot.

The real inspiring achievement that keeps you going day to day

are these little successes that you try to achieve on a daily basis.

They're literally the greatest moments of your life,

even though you're experiencing them by yourself,

standing there, staring at this flat surface.

That's where the real art exists, in those tiny little moments.

All of this process that I go through,

you know, the ultimate aim is to make this work of art

that will outlive me, will outlive the Queen,

will outlive all of us that are here.

And in future generations, people will say, "That's a nice painting."

And people will value it, not because I did it,

or because of who's depicted, but because of the way it's done.

There's a whole world between me and the Queen.

The difference in this process and my normal process

is the lack of the personal connection.

Because for a painter, especially a portrait painter...

..what you're trying to do is paint an image

that is revealing, not just of the person and the position they occupy,

but something about them as a human being as well.

I have to present it to the commissioners first.

And then after that, it has to be presented to the Queen.

She would sign off on the image at this stage.

All these people that I study and have admired forever,

they're all dead.

Like, you know, Piero della Francesca, he died in 1492.

But I still refer back to what he did.

Not only his work, but his thinking

and his sensibility and personality live on through that work.

This is home.

That's what it is.

I haven't been here in 30 years, but this feels like home.

There's a subtlety to his colours and his tonalities

and the kind of spatial construction that I just don't see anywhere else.

He's a really unique personality in the history of art.

Through the work, I sense that he thought

and felt about the universe the same way that I do.

The hope is to interest her in the process

that I go through and why I go through that process.

So what I'm going to try and do is...

show Her Majesty

the last of what I'd call the kind of pre-preliminary maquettes.

And this is... So far, this is like the...

the kind of end of the journey to this stage,

just so she gets an idea of the point at which I've arrived.

And I'll work my way back to...

..those.

I think the earliest one is like that,

which is again sketchier looking, still.

And I'll also put out these details of her face.

And I'll try to explain to her

that it's not just because I like playing with dolls,

but, you know, there's real purpose

into all the work of going into building this model.

Her response to this

is probably going to tell me a lot about who she is

and the kind of person she is.

If she finds it interesting, that says one thing about her.

If she doesn't find it at all interesting,

that says something else.

But I'm sure, um, you know,

she'll be able to interject whenever she wants.

And if she's seen enough, that's enough, and that's...

that will be that.

But we'll see.

I bet within the first minute,

I'm going to have a feeling from her,

what direction it's going to go in.

It was nice to be able to talk her through the whole process.

And all the while too, it was nice to be able to,

being one on one, I could really get to see her up close

and we did go over,

It was slotted as a 20 minute audience, it went 45 minutes.

I've been doing so much talking the last few days

that I started to lose my voice in the middle of it

I thought, oh, gees... so, I was coughing a bit.

So she said, "Would you like some water?'" I said, "OK."

So she presses a button and somebody comes in and asks, you know,

"Can we have a glass of water?" "One or two, ma'am?" "Just one."

So he brings in the water, she hands me the glass of water.

So that's... So I got a glass of water from the Queen.

I felt that by the end of it

she was quite engaged with the process and excited by the process.

You start to get a feel for personality,

which is what I was hoping for in the end.

You know, just an inkling of the humanity behind the symbol.

I think what she appreciated was the commitment to the...

not just this work, but to art itself and my vocation.

She's taken her role so seriously.

I think that is her life.

And I kind of feel the same way about art.

I've devoted my whole life to it and committed myself to it.

And it gets to the point where you become that.

It's not that you have a profession.

I think we both have this vocation, we're both committed to it.

You know, we'll probably both die doing the thing that we love to do.

I felt that she sensed a similar commitment

and sensibility in this project that I was doing for her.

I think the whole project, I'm sure,

is a once-in-a-lifetime experience too.

Before you get approval, you're always apprehensive

and you feel very alone in what you've done

and the point you've gotten to.

But now it feels like clear sailing, the only obstacles being, you know,

my ability to make a really good piece of art.

BANGING

How to stretch a canvas... a valuable thing.

I think painting pictures is a lot more physically taxing

than people would imagine.

I think they have this vision of artists just, you know,

sitting at a stool in front of a canvas

daubing little blobs of paint on to a canvas all day.

But there's really a lot more to it than that.

I do this part myself

just because I'm pretty fussy about the kind of surface I work on

and the nature of the stretcher.

I could've gotten other people to do it,

but I enjoy this part of the process

and I like to have control of it as well.

Ah, it's smooth.

It looks good.

She's my guardian angel, I guess.

It's just a reminder that I've got to, you know,

watch myself and do as good a job as I possibly can.

I always believed, right from the very beginning, what would

win out in the end is diligence and persistence and consistency.

I think a career is a kind of work of art in itself.

Using real life as not only a catalyst,

but the raw material of your art form

still makes perfect sense to me,

regardless of the ideologies that come and go.

I'm sure that I could have had a much better rapport with

the critical world if I'd put in the time

and effort to explain myself and all the rest of that.

But I was too busy just making the art.

The big painting has actually moved along very quickly.

It's because of all of that kind of practice for the past year

with this image.

In one way it's the scariest stage because you're getting to the point

where you're saying to yourself, "OK, this is the best I could do."

You're almost finished.

On the other hand, it's the most exciting

because you feel like you're close to achieving something

that's close to your mind's eye vision you started with.

You generally don't ever reach that point,

but if you can get close to it that's really satisfying.

I can wander around the painting quite nicely and enjoy it

and kind of weave in and out of the space and not stop anywhere.

Whenever you stop, when your eye stops moving somewhere,

you've got a problem.

Because I think it expresses what I'm about

in terms of my own painterly ideology.

And if people don't like it,

it will be for reasons that are probably out of my control.

It will be interesting to see how long

she actually looks at the painting.

Maybe she'll just glance like this and then that's it, it's over.

The thing I'm really thinking about more than anything... It's not...

It's not so much, you know, meeting the Queen

or the Prime Minister or all the other guests that are there.

It's, one, seeing the painting in a different setting,

because I haven't seen it now finished

since it left the studio almost half a year ago, I guess.

And then, seeing the reaction to the painting.

An unveiling, in a way, it's the end of the painting for me.

You know, the end of the project

and I've moved on to other things at least in my imagination.

But for everyone else it's the birth of the painting.

This is the beginning of the life, the public life, of the work of art.

Some of them have seen the process, the sketches and whatnot.

But some of them will have no idea of what it looks like.

Actually I'd love to be one of them.

I'd love to be able to see it just as if it was, you know,

dropped out of the sky.

But sometimes the unveiling gives you a hint of that feeling,

because it's in a foreign place.

You know, it's framed, it's lit differently.

I haven't seen it for a while and I've forgotten some of the trials

and tribulations of getting there.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it in the palace and to see

if it holds up against the architecture, the decoration,

the other paintings that are in there.

I'm hoping it does. But we'll see.

APPLAUSE

This portrait represents the appreciation of all Canadians

for 60 years of outstanding service to our country and the Commonwealth

and we'd be honoured if you would do us the pleasure

of unveiling the portrait.

APPLAUSE

It's changed quite a bit since I last saw it.

Yes it's gone from, like, six inches...

LAUGHTER

Yeah, the composition has...

I like it.

How on earth did you get it...

INDISTINCT CONVERSATION

I like it. I think it's good.

Yeah, I think her first reaction was she was surprised at how big it was.

I said, "You almost think it should stay here, because it

"looks so good in that room. Just hang it up the wall and leave it."

And she also said, "You've changed it,"

almost like an accusation.

And I thought, OK.

Then I tried to explain why I've changed it.

I said, "For one thing it went from six inches tall to nine feet tall."

But she said, "No you've changed other things," which is true.

Like I manipulated some of the relationship

of her figure to the furniture.

I was kind of amazed that she'd remember.

Maybe she'd done her homework and looked at the previous images.

But she remembered, you know, how things were situated

and noticed that it was changed.

But you know, she was smiling and laughing about it.

She did say, I think it was, "grand and marvellous."

I think she was pleased.

Today I feel like, with the unveiling,

the process really has ended for me.

I've kind of moved on to other things. But I'm concerned...

It's like being a parent

and seeing your kids walk out into the big, bad world.

Now I'm watching the painting and the response to it, you know,

the good and the bad.

And that where my mind was yesterday and it still is today.

Striving to make a lasting work of art is a kind of goal.

But you've got to enjoy getting there.

The real joy and the reality is making the stuff.

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