Andrew Tift, Artist - I am Andrew Tift and we are in my studio at
the moment in Walsall in the West Midlands. My background is, I suppose, what we would
call working class. My dad worked in the steel industry buying and selling steel. My mum
was a dinner lady. When I was at school I felt that I would like
to do painting and drawing as a career. Around the time I was about 20/21 I suddenly realised
that I liked painting people most of all. It was a very simple realisation, but I think
sometimes they are the most important. It has really been the driving force for the
last 25 years for me really. Some of my subjects are self motivated. I
look for people. For example, just down the road there is a bar and it is like a Hell’s
Angels bar and all the bikers go there. I did a big project in the Black Country about
the demise of the steel industry in the West Midlands. I have done projects in New Mexico
in America. It felt like a real American road trip just driving around bumping into people
and doing their portraits. The public figures just come about. People just contact me. The
House of Lords contacted me to do the one of Lord Carrington.
Everybody is interesting, whether it is a public figure like Tony Benn or Neil Kinnock.
That is the enduring aspect and love of portraiture for me. As soon as I do a portrait and I am
starting a new head that is it, I am there. First of all, I liaise with the sitter’s
secretary normally. Initially just conversation based. We talk about the sitter. We talk about
what we might like to put into the portrait. All the time I am watching the sitter, seeing
how they sit, seeing how they hold themselves and move around. Also, I am thinking about
lighting and composition. So my mind is totally buzzing all the time.
With Lord Carrington, he is such a lovely chap I think we hit it off fairly quickly.
We talked about his career, although not quite so much his career but about the rooms in
his house and where we might like to set the portrait, thinking about how I could pose
him, whether it would be seated, whether he would be standing. He expects quite a high
standard because previously his ancestors have been painted by Joshua Reynolds and people
like that. That painting was in the room that we were talking in and he said, ‘Do you
think you can do one as good as that one?’ You could almost walk into his house and you
would not necessarily know that he was a politician because it is a very beautiful manor house
that he lives in, but I wanted it in some ways to be about the ancestry that he has
got and the way the lords went right the way through history and he is the current one.
It is always an honour to be asked by an institution like Parliament or a big public gallery to
do a portrait commission because you know that they are going to look after it and keep
it there for a long, long time. I think really what I am looking for in this portrait is
an honest interpretation of Lord Carrington that reflects the time that I spent with him.
Hopefully, I will be able to bring something out of him that people will be able to respond
to, not just now but in 300 years time when they are standing in the House of Lords.