Edward Lucie-Smith
oil on canvas
68.6 x 54.5 cm
1985
collection: the artist

Edward Lucie-Smith
pencil
22.8 x 20.3 cm
1984
National Portrait Gallery

Edward Lucie-Smith
oil on board
12.1 x 10.2 cm
1984
National Portrait Gallery

Edward Lucie-Smith whom I've known for twenty years was an early and generous supporter of my work. He is no stranger to sitting and has been drawn and painted many times, notably by R. B. Kitaj and Michael Leonard. At his suggestion I started work on a portrait in 1983. I made several drawings, a small oil study and a lithograph before commencing the canvas itself. During this study period I saw him dressed in various ways and we settled on the clothes he is wearing in that they seemed most used to him: the jacket especially hung easily about him like an old friend.

He sits in the corner of my studio which I usually use for portraits and on a chair of curious design which I bought specially as seeming to match his personality. The chair turned out to be identical with one he owned himself (perhaps the only other example: I have almost come to expect such uncanny coincidences).

I wanted the picture to contain art objects that would not only indicate his enormous range of taste, but be mute witness in other ways. I knew that I had to find from my collection a suitable piece of African sculpture since Teddy was born in the West Indies and has black African blood. Having tried one or two things I saw, as soon as I put it on a stand, that the Congo Maternity was right. It both echoed his pose and talked about a mother/child relationship that was important to him. To represent modern painting I decided to use one of my own favourite kinds of process picture and one that would grow with the portrait itself. I therefore put up the current Terminal Grey which of course got added to week by week and became a catalogue of the colours used in the portrait (as well as other works I was doing at the time). This was a poetic echo of the procedures used in pictures I'd made in the seventies where the image is surrounded by a catalogue of the colours of its making, including the colours in this case that went into painting the image of the Terminal Grey painting that catalogued etc. etc... the very kind of convolution that I most enjoy especially when as here the result is dumb and simple. This combination of the sophisticated and the primitive seemed to be enough especially since the 'primitive' object was so much more formally sophisticated than the cunning one.

Teddy was often away and there were some quite long breaks to account for the length of time the work took. There were something like twenty-five sittings in all.

The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 36-37