PAUL BENNEY: What really interests me
is the essence of the person I'm with,
and unravelling the onion bit by bit.
I have to be able to engage with that person
on a deep, sort of intimate, psychological level,
as well as just being able to paint something formally.
My over-riding concern
is that they feel like they are in the hands,
or in the presence of somebody who is on their side,
and it's not a combative enterprise,
and the finished work should reflect a collaborative nature
of what we're doing,
rather than the sitter as a passive person
who just sits there and accepts my gaze.
Okay, we're ready to go.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: I think I probably sit for Paul
maybe five or even six times,
and he said right at the beginning,
the more times that I could manage, the better it would be for him.
It's an enormous privilege to have a portrait painted,
and it is obviously because I am the Lord Speaker.
That's really why I'm being painted,
it's nothing to do with me, personally,
it's to do with the office.
What Paul decided was that I should be painted
in the costume that I normally wear,
which is sort of court dress.
I'm going to try and get it on right first time.
I normally wear this for things like
funerals, memorials, things like that,
and the state opening,
but today I'm wearing it for Paul.
PAUL BENNEY: By all means.
We'll do a little bit on the background
and some more on your face.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: Right.
PAUL BENNEY: A lot of how we judge people
is through what's going on in the face,
what's coming out of the face.
That's why we like portraits,
because it reveals something about ourselves, as well.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: I've never been painted before,
so this is the first time.
I thought it was going to be quite a sort of, static affair,
that I'd sort of sit here, and I'd have my own thoughts,
and I'd have to keep one position, and in fact actually,
what it is, is a conversation, it's a relationship.
PAUL BENNEY: What I try and do,
and it's very much an unconscious thing,
I allow that person's personality
to seep into my consciousness,
and I act as almost like a medium.
There are points in the process where I really feel
almost not present,
because I'm channelling that person, in a sense.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: I tell you who did come last week,
which was fantastic, and that was President Jimmy Carter.
PAUL BENNEY: Gosh, I missed all this.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: He was wonderful.
He and his wife, Rosalynn, still spend a week a year,
physically, hands-on, building houses
in under-developed parts the world over.
PAUL BENNEY: If you were sitting with a friend, you wouldn't be thinking,
"Ooh, I really need to get some secrets out of this person."
They just come, because you trust each other
and people generally like to reveal themselves
to people that they trust.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: To be looked at so intently,
not intensely but intently, that could be quite threatening.
If I didn't get on with you,
I would find that quite threatening, I think.
Sometimes photographs can get something in
that is about the person, the look in the eyes,
the things like that, they can get something.
PAUL BENNEY: But the thing about painting
is that it's from life, anyways,
that I'm collecting, literally,
thousands of moments that you and I have,
that I've got hundreds of thousands of moments
that I can use to inform my vision, as it were,
and that distillation is sort of manifest
right there at the very end.
As the audience who sees this painting,
even if they don't know you, it will hopefully come across
more like a diary of our time that we spent together,
a visual diary.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: The word I think that one has to use is trust,
because, actually, to find someone that you like
and get on with, all of that feels very relaxed
and comfortable and good,
and I think that maybe comes out in the painting.
PAUL BENNEY: It's very much trying to tread a line
between the informality that I feel with Frances D'Souza,
and the formality that's embedded in the work.
The sense that this person is not just a cypher,
not just a figurehead,
but somebody who has their own life and personality.
BARONESS D'SOUZA: Paul decided that it ought to have
this kind of formal background,
so he's placed the portrait, as it were, in the River Room,
and the River Room is a rather lovely room,
which used to be the Lord Chancellor's sitting room
in the House of Lords,
which has got this rather famous Pugin wallpaper on it.
A formal portrait can be thought of as a kind of formal photograph,
but a painting is clearly something quite different
because what it does,
is to record something of the interaction
between the sitter and the painter.
I kind of see a side of me that perhaps I hadn't quite realised,
so it's an extremely interesting process.
PAUL BENNEY: As far as I know, there are artists who don't like you
to see the work, if you're a sitter, until the end,
and there's this dramatic unveiling.
I've never really understood that.
I can imagine if you were a sitter,
and you weren't allowed to see the painting,
you'd be getting progressively more and more nervous about it,
until the end, and then it could be just an enormous shock.
But in my case, it's very good that the painting
is seen as it goes through the various stages,
so the sitter is almost as invested in it as I am
by the time it's finished.
Unlike a cosmetic surgeon,
if you go wrong with somebody's face under the knife,
then you really go wrong, but in my case,
I can always retrieve it at last resort, with extra paint.