Ben Arongundade

This was a practice run for my ‘performance’ in SKY TV’s Portrait Artist of the Year heat 2 at Battersea Arts Centre in April. I needed to complete a portrait in 4 hours flat so this proved I could do that on a reasonably big scale. I also knew that many contestants relied on a tablet photo of the sitter so I thought it would be good practice to work from a photo rather than life. Finally I needed to practice a particular strategy for building up the painting starting with an underdrawing in a coloured oil paint to get the shapes and proportions right. Tradionally portrait painters in the 17th and 18th centuries had sometimes used a dull green as an underpainting so i was curious to see what a brighter green would look like. Painted from a photograph in the Guardian newspaper featuring an interview with writer Ben Arongundade the painting is about 10 times bigger than the photograph. I’d not come across him before but I really liked the look in his eye. The photographer arranged him surrounded by plants but I wanted keep it simple and to focus on the head and shoulders. I started the portrait with a lime green underpainting as an experiment and it seemed to work so I used the same green for the background which created a highly energised feel as if in a tropical environment zinging with limes and other citrus fruits. Lime green tends to accentuate purply reds so there is a simultaneous contrast of colours happening in the skin tones adding to the feeling of tropical heat. The original photograph was a good deal cooler.