Take a Moment with Mark Haddon

A superb portrait. Genuinely moving for reasons I can’t quite articulate - something I rarely feel about a portrait. In particular I love the way the surface shimmers from paint to flesh and back to paint again.

There’s something of Kehinde Wiley about this. It feels monumental, though it could be eight inches high for all I know. It also pulls of the feat of being borderline photorealistic - and utilising a very static pose - yet remaining completely alive.

A lot of painters had to wrestle with the problem of depicting subjects in face-obscuring PPE. This solves the problem effortlessly, not least by the way it fills the frame with such energy. The double reflection in the double glasses, the tilt of the head, the intensity of the eyes… and my favourite, detail, the mask being sucked in as the subject breathes.

Many painters were torn between trying to humanise subjects in a dehumanising situation (masks, eye protectors, gloves), and on the other hand emphasising the way those things dehumanised the subject. This does both at the same time. It is otherworldy but warm at the same time, a portrait of someone managing to be completely human despite of the terrible circumstances.

I love the expressionistic confidence of this. Looked at literally, the right side of the face is too small, the nose is facing us, which it shouldn’t be, and the line of the jaw is completely absent. And yet it is absolutely right. A perfect demonstration of the way painting is not about copying the world but about performing a kind of visual magic.