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Cowichan sweater self portrait 1973

This portrait of me in a red rollneck sweater was done was I was in Australia, advertising ‘British Paints’. Without a doubt, it is the happiest piece of painting technique I’ve ever achieved. I love the slap-happy way the red of the rollneck impinges on the grey of the Cowichan sweater. The painting is very impressionistic throughout, and I think Bill Veal would have been proud of me.
Rolf Harris Album Cover

This was a particularly happy two-colour linocut. I drew my own image, seen in the mirror, directly on to the lino. This meant that when it was printed, it reversed from the mirror image to being the right way round. I love the lettering – my own particular style.
Self portrait (80th Year)

It was suggested to me that I should really do a new self portrait to mark my eightieth year. I’d just accidentally dropped my old glasses from my top pocket without noticing. Then, wouldn’t you know, I’d driven over them in my car! This was the first time I got to wear the new ones. I took a photo of myself in the mirror to work from then took another one of my right hand holding the brush (which I stuck onto the original photo). I wanted to get a real look of concentration in the painting and I think it works.
Self Portrait in School Uniform

I was 14 or so, and I’d just been awarded this sports blazer, having won the open 440 yard free-style event in the swimming carnival the previous year, my first year of high school. Unheard of! I decided to commemorate getting this amazing blazer by painting my portrait in our bathroom, which had the only mirror in the house. The way I worked then was to draw every shape I saw accurately in pencil first – like a map – and fill it in with colour later.
Self-portrait in a Green Sweater

The portrait in the green sweater and red shirt was done in 1982 in front of television cameras at the Melbourne Art Gallery. It was a very nerve-wracking experience. An oil painting, it was finished in just over an hour and I was in a blind panic for most of that time. At one stage, when I turned from concentrating on the canvas to find the huge lens of the TV camera just a foot away from me, I nearly died of fright. I’d been so engrossed in getting all the tones, colours and shapes right that I had totally forgotten I was being filmed.
Self-Portrait in Pensive mood 2010

The changing face of Rolf…
Self-portrait in a Red Striped Shirt

The first version of this self-portrait was really appalling – all out of proportion and nothing like me – and it stood propped against the wall for a couple of months. Then one day I thought: this is ridiculous, and I got on with fixing it up. I particularly like how the background colour runs into the shadow area of the striped shirt collar, and the lovely black shadows on the red over-shirt work perfectly. The red and green are great, contrasting opposite colours and work well together.

Giraffes Browsing

This painting probably took me longer than anything else I’ve ever done. The anatomy of giraffes just seems totally wrong, however you look at them, so whatever you paint seems wrong too. I was thrilled with the huge expanse of darkness behind the brilliantly lit group of giraffes and roughed in the background with huge globs of oil paint and a palette knife. Then I started the laborious task of painting and repainting as I tried to get the animals to look right – it took forever. I put in the final little tufts of grass with a rigger brush, and these and the lighter bits of foliage helped to pull everything together and balance the composition.
Good Book

The photograph I used for this painting came from the same book as Water is Life and Woman from Afar, Ethiopia. Once again, as in so many of my paintings, I love the effect of the brilliant sunlight, which seemed to paint the picture for me. The perspective given by the metal studs on the huge wooden door on the left leads the eye out to the blurred landscape and the brilliant blue sky. I’m particularly pleased with the orangey reflected light, which comes from the figure of the man and is thrown back onto the inside of the two steps and the wall.
Lioness

This lioness looks totally alert and ready for action. She is tilting her head slightly to the left so the shadow falls over her eye, keeping the brilliant direct light out of her pupil. I love the green shadow on her eye.
Look West Lion

For this painting of a lion as it stared into the setting sun, I used a palette knife throughout. I think it gives the lion a rugged, battered look that is very endearing and the orange sunlight reflected in the eyes really brings them to life.
Moonlit Lion

This was done with a palette knife and the painting of the tiny whiskers proved quite difficult – you just have to use the edge of the knife and hope you get something that works. I love the fact that it is all in blue and black, with the signature in cobalt violet providing the only colour change.
Red Lion

This was done in acrylics and I used a rigger brush to put in all the hairs radiating from the lion’s head. I decided I wasn’t going to do anything with a larger brush, just stick with the tiny rigger. I love the scars across his nose, where he’d been scratched, and the brilliant light in the eyes.
Trust

I did this from a photo I took in South Africa. The boy had some food to tempt the starling closer to him, but I knew if he moved too fast the bird would be off. I love the gorgeous colours of the starling – almost like shot silk.
Tsavo Orphans

I painted this picture for our dear friends Michael and Dee Kelly as a special present, and when Alwen and I turned up with it on Dee’s birthday she was absolutely overwhelmed. The painting had been exhibited and the gallery owner was mortified when he discovered I didn’t want it sold. It’s one of my happiest wildlife paintings.
Water is Life

This was an absolutely staggering image and I couldn’t wait to paint it. I saw it in a book of photographs taken in Africa, titled African Ark by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher. I contacted the photographers and asked permission to use some of the images as reference. I loved the details of the man’s face, his hands clutching the Coptic cross, his feet peeping out from the shadow of his robe and the deep, deep darkness of the cave behind him. I worked over a roughened oil paint background so that the wonderful texture would come through the final paint.

Bindi Pearl Earring

Our daughter Bindi came with me to Delft in Holland. I painted this picture of her, dressed as closely as possible to the model in Vermeer’s famous painting.
Coming from the Mill Inspired by L.S.Lowry

In my representation of Lowry’s Coming from the Mill, I’ve drawn some Australian fence posts in the foreground and a very fat Australian couple walking alongside them. They were modelled on two Australian tourists, who came up and chatted to me while we were filming. They are in stark contrast to the skin-and-bone ‘Lowrytype’ characters in the rest of the painting.
Houses of Parliament Inspired by Monet

We went out on the ‘London Duck’, an amphibious craft that can be driven along the road and then launched off into the River Thames. I had a bunch of amateur painters with me and we all tried hard to paint the scene. We were tethered in position, but the Duck kept turning backwards and forwards through about 180 degrees as the tide gradually changed. The view was different every five seconds and, to cap it all, the brilliant sunlight was rapidly obscured by a huge cloud that moved across the sky. A total nightmare!
Lautrec-Style ‘Rolf on Art’ Poster

This was based on Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous Aristide Bruant poster and I created it at the Curwen Studio in Cambridgeshire, with the help of three art students from Anglia University – Dan Hallett, Paula Metcalf and Hannah Web. Tom Martin, Curwen’s lithograph printer, explained to us how Lautrec would have made his various lithographic stones and printed them, and we did ours exactly the same way. I’d like to thank him for steering us through the exercise so wonderfully. When it was all finished and printed, someone questioned my French translation of my catchphrase – ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’ – quoting the actual French wording that should have been used. A fine time to tell me!
Self-Portrait in the Style of Rembrandt

Just before we went to Amsterdam to film my selfportrait in the style of Rembrandt, I visited the National Gallery in London to talk to an expert, David Bomford, about Rembrandt’s approach to portrait painting (David is now Acting Director at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles). I was told that the great master built up his painting from an initial dark-brown background on which he first painted his accurate sketch of the face in a darker fine line brush drawing. Then he would add the brilliant highlights and then the intermediate tones would be scumbled in, using half-tone white paint. When he had the tonal painting finished as accurately as he could, only THEN would he start using actual flesh colours. It was all a revelation to me and I tried to follow his method as accurately as I could. People are always asking me why I look so miserable in the picture. The truth is you can’t hold a smile for two and a half hours while you paint. That fixed smile cracks and falls off your face onto the floor with a crash!
Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

For this, we went to Columbia Road flower market in London’s East End and three amateur painters were part of the programme with me. The canvas the BBC had bought for me was twice as big as I wanted and frightened the wits out of me when I saw it. We bought sunflowers at the market and set them up. I decided to try and do an impression of the view, but as the public was milling about I realised I would just have to do a blank background. I made it a dark brown so it would contrast with the yellow of the flowers – it looked absolutely awful. The three amateurs produced work that put mine in the shade. My painting was a disaster. When I got the canvas home, I left it to dry for a week and then repainted the background to get the effect that Van Gogh and our three amateurs had achieved so well. The marvellous cameraman, Paul Hodgson-Hutton, came out to our home to film the repair happening. I thought that the process would make a great feature in the programme, but they had no time to include it all. They just showed the finished, repaired painting.
The Birth of Venus Inspired by Boticelli

I joined a marvellous group of four egg tempera experts – Rob Milliken, Peter Murphy, Rebecca Merry and Maz Jackson. They taught me the rudiments of the process and did most of the hard work on this version of Botticelli’s famous painting. It was a joy to be with them and to be a part of their team. I really loved working on this
The Birthday Party Inspired by Bruegel

For this Bruegel-style painting we had to find an occasion – something similar to Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding Feast – and we were lucky enough to hear about this birthday party. The lady in the floral dress and the young man two tables away in the white shirt, talking to the girls, were mother and son, both celebrating their birthdays on the same day. From my secret vantage point, I took so many Polaroid shots through a tiny hole in a big screen that when I came to paint the huge picture the floor was littered with these tiny square prints
The Kiss Inspired by Klimt

Two models posed for us among the commuter crowds at Waterloo Station. I can’t remember the exact reasoning behind this, but I think the producers wanted to convey the sadness of a parting. I did all the drawings and took reference photos, then at a later date the crew and I went to Vienna to see the original. It’s about 6ft square and occupies the whole of one wall at the Belvedere Palace – what a marvellous sight! In my version of the painting, I used my reference for the couple but I was also inspired by aboriginal paintings for the pattern on the man’s kaftan, and the images two-thirds of the way down on the left are from Australian aboriginal rock paintings of ghostly spirit figures. I made all the leaves on the creeper into little golden hearts and used gold paint throughout to imitate Klimt’s love of gold leaf.
Water Lillies Inspired by Monet

The painting at Giverny, where Monet lived, was done in the open air in the worst weather you can imagine. One huge umbrella kept the pouring rain off me and another two tried to protect the cameras. It was a very harrowing experience.
House at Berwick-upon-Tweed Inspired by L.S.Lowry

The house at Berwick-upon-Tweed is probably one of the happiest paintings I’ve ever done. I love the disgruntled old man standing in his doorway, looking at the lovers on the path. you don’t see any of them at first.
Mona Lisa's Smile

This is my small section of a huge composite painting, which was done in Edinburgh for the programme, Rolf on Art: The Big Picture. When we were filming, the weather was so bad and the wind gusting so fiercely that we were unable to assemble all the composite paintings vertically on the huge frame provided. It would have blown down. We had to lay the frame on the ground for the assemblage, and get the cameras up as high as possible to record the process.

Angel In the Doorway

This is a painting of my lovely Alwen. We were exploring different areas of Vancouver in the early 1960s and we came upon this deserted, half-completed church. The story was that it was being built for the local Canadian Indian community, some of whom were on the work force. When a worker fell from the rafters to his death one day everyone else walked out, saying: ‘Your god is not smiling on us and we will not come here again.’
Bicycle Boredom

I painted this before I knew about the undercoat that L. S. Lowry put on all his paintings. Had I known, I would have used that process here to get the random colours of the generations of flaking paint on the walls. I loved this image when I took the photograph, but the man was facing the other way. I turned him round when I did the painting so he faces into the picture. I think it works.
Blue Hills

When I have a lot of paint left on my palette I like to put it onto a piece of board with a palette knife, hoping it will lead to a painting later on. This happened to perfection in this instance. I was able to turn the browns and whites I’d scraped across the bottom of the board, into the limestone country visible through the grass in the foreground of the painting. I love the gum trees in the background, standing proud against the blue hills and the cloudy sky.
Brits Abroad

This couple were sitting opposite us at a café in Venice and were obviously wondering what on earth they were doing there. They look bored witless and seemed to me to epitomise the attitude of a certain kind of British holidaymaker. It took me days to get the man’s right arm anatomically accurate – at first, it looked for all the world like a sausage-shaped balloon. It was a devil to paint.
Canadian Mountain Shack

One day when travelling in British Columbia, my wife and I saw this stunning scene – a shack after a thick snowfall, with the mountain and pine trees rearing up behind it. I took several photographs and particularly loved the looseness of the foreground when I came to do the painting. In retrospect, I wish I had made my signature more unobtrusive.
Fishermen by Moonlight

A friend of mine, Mike Lewin, sent me a greetings card with this picture, one of his own photographs. I loved the image and, with his permission, did a painting from it.
Fishing Boat, Vancouver

I must have repainted this boat eight times as I tried to get it looking like it was sitting flat on the water. At one stage, it was tipping uphill, but when I corrected that I found it was suddenly pointing downwards. Eventually, this painting captured the feel of the shoreline of the islands around Vancouver, where washed-up cedar provides a plentiful supply of firewood. The smoke from a fire can be seen in the distance.
Fishing at Dusk, Malta

I painted this from a great photograph taken looking right into the setting sun. I used pinks, oranges and reds, as well as brilliant yellow and white for the reflections of the sunlight. In the shadow areas, the black and green worked wonderfully.
Greek Whitewasher

I was so thrilled to come across this scene of a man whitewashing a wall. Everything seemed to be blue, except for the colour of his face and arms. I love the slight difference made by the peak of his cap, which is green against all that blue.
In The Shade

The two men are sitting by a beached vessel, while behind them blinding sun lights up the water and the other boats. I started painting this with a deep red background, parts of which can be seen through the sunlight on the boats. As I look at the painting, I almost feel as if I could climb into that empty boat.
Lazy Afternoon, Malta

I painted this from a photograph I took in Malta in the 1970s. I covered the whole canvas with a pale dingy green and when it was dry, I started work on the picture. You can see the base colour showing through the peeling paint on the back of the boat. To me, this is a very calming image and I loved painting the higgledy-piggledy reflection of the single mast on the right.
Lifelong Friends

These two lived alongside one another in a row of tiny stone buildings in Bugibba in Malta, near Caesar’s Night Club, which we owned in the 1970s. Both of these wonderful old men are now dead and gone and their houses have been demolished to make room for high-rise flats. Isn’t it sad? It’s interesting to note that they had tried to obliterate the anti-Mintoff electioneering slogan someone had daubed on their wall, but the quality of the whitewash left the inflammatory words still showing through quite clearly
Lovers on the Seine (The Kiss)

My wife and I went on a boat trip on the Seine in Paris and I took a million photos along the way. This was one of the happiest. I love the blinding white light reflected from the backrest of the chair alongside the man, as well as the graffiti you can see in every direction. I took forever to paint this and I loved every minute of it.
Machu Picchu

I was commissioned to paint this by the man who’d taken the photograph. It was probably the most difficult painting I’ve ever done in terms of the architecture, as each section of buildings seemed to be tilted at a different angle and on a different level and they didn’t conform to any architectural plan I’ve ever seen. But I love the mountain falling away behind the buildings into an abyss on either side and the swirling mist over everything.
Mending the Nets

This is on the island of Hydra in Greece. I conceived the idea of having everything radiating out from the thumb on the fisherman’s right hand and to this end I used a rigger brush to paint lines of thick cerulean blue from that point to cover the whole canvas. When that paint was dry, I began the rest of the painting over the top of it and I’m thrilled with the result. I love the silhouette of the man’s face and the cigarette stub hanging from his mouth.
Sri Lankan Adventure

This was from a photograph taken on a recent trip to Sri Lanka. We got there just after the tsunami had devastated much of the coast, but this area seemed to have remained untouched. I particularly like the holes eaten through the hanging leaves on the right and I love the different body shapes and attitudes of the five men in the picture. I’d like to thank my wife Alwen for her invaluable help on the anatomy and figure work in this picture and in all my paintings. I had to repaint the man on the left several times before I got him right. It’s funny, but an artist can sometimes be too close to his painting. It’s the ‘I was there when I painted this so it must be perfect’ syndrome. The artist gets used to looking at, and accepting, wrong anatomy. When someone else, like my wife, looks at the painting with fresh eyes, she immediately sees any glaring errors.
The Waitress

We were in Edinburgh to see a friend of mine who was performing at the Festival. That evening we all went out to dinner and I noticed this waitress, who looked exquisite. I must have taken 20 different shots of her as she went about her work, taking orders and writing bills.
Thin Ice

It was midwinter and I was driving up the M4 to London. Suddenly, I saw this image of open water with ice and snow on either side so I stopped the car and parked on the hard shoulder while I made a detailed drawing. I later found out I was totally illegally parked there. When I came to paint the scene, I covered the canvas with orange first as a contrast to the ever-present pale blue.
Time Goes By

When people look at this, many of them tell me how they love the old man sitting on his own with his dog in the square. I say, ‘What about the other bloke?’ They just don’t notice him. This was wonderful to paint, as I roughed up the basic paint on the canvas and left some great chunky undercoat on the left. When that was dry, I painted over it to get the rough stone-like quality. Somehow a hole was punched in this canvas by accident – just by the second window along at the top. I patched it up with a piece of canvas and strong glue and painted over the patch. Maybe you can see it?
Fishing Boats

This scene in Hydra, Greece, was one of the first long vertical paintings that I tackled and I just love the shape of it. I think Hayward Veal would have been proud of my impressionistic approach, especially with the loose brushwork on the sky and distant blue of the buildings and mountains beyond. I can feel the gentle swell of the waves in the foreground when I look at this painting.

Alex Haussmann

This was the first time I felt I’d understood impressionism, working with the techniques I’d learned from Hayward Veal. I kept this portrait of my close friend Alex very loose and didn’t overwork it – it’s a good likeness.
Alwen Sleeping

We hadn’t been married long when I took the photo from which this large painting was made. It’s a very calm and peaceful picture and I love it.
Alwen Waking

This is a close-up of a portrait that I’m very proud of – my lovely Alwen just waking up. There’s a tiny bit of daylight glinting in that barely open eye
Alwen, Late Sun, Spain

Alwen had suffered from alopecia and lost all her hair. It was just growing back at the time of this painting. We were on holiday in Spain and in a chalet with friends. Brilliant sunlight was coming through the window and striking the wall behind her. At the same time, blue daylight flooded in from the open doorway in front of her to create a wonderful juxtaposition of colours. What a beautiful woman!
Alwen

I painted this when Alwen and I were first married. It’s a lovely exercise in using as little paint as possible and I limited myself to red, white and black. Everything had to be in one of those colours or a mixture of them. There’s only one extra – a tiny little bit of yellow on her hair band. I like the way her feet go off the edge, but this wasn’t a planned bit of genius – I just ran out of space.
Athol Thomas

Athol was a journalist I knew from Perth who came to Britain to get experience of working in Fleet Street, which was the centre of the newspaper world until quite recently. He invited me into his office one Saturday to paint his portrait. I took along a big sheet of hardboard and painted him at his desk in front of his big old typewriter, with the regulation cigarette in a holder, clamped between his lips. This was one of those happy times when everything worked.
Blossoms in the Back Seat

This is painted from a photograph taken of a dear friend, Doris Monet, who had been staying with us. She was sitting in a taxi in total shadow and I loved the whole feeling of silhouette about her.
Blue Elvis

I painted this to mark the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. I love his stance – he’s in his trademark martial arts pose, having just punched the air with his fist.
Book at Lunchtime

I was being driven home from an early morning radio interview in the West End, when I suddenly yelled at the driver to stop. This beautiful redhead was perched on the steps reading a book and I liked the picture she made. I got out of the car, told her how lovely she looked and asked her permission to take a photograph with a view to painting the image. She agreed and the result pleased me enormously.
Breakfast Confrontation

When we were breakfasting before filming in Earl’s Court (see Early Morning, Earl’s Court Square), this couple opposite us were having a very one-sided conversation. The poor man seemed to be taking it all, as his shoulders hunched further and further up to his ears. We all felt sorry for him and they neither of them noticed me taking the photograph.
Cookham Fête

I’m thrilled with the randomness of all the different people crammed together at this summer fête. Things I’m particularly pleased with are the politician canvassing for votes, the lady who’s oblivious to everybody as she files her nails, the back view of the lady cramming a hamburger into her mouth, the lovely fine line of the necklace of the woman on the right, and the blue reflected light on the balding head of the man next to her. I had a ball painting this brilliant, sun-lit scene.
Count the Days

When we were working on Rolf’s Walkabout for BBC radio, we visited many small villages to record our programmes. This lovely old man was sitting over a pint in a pub where we went for lunch. The blinding sunlight was pouring in from the left hand side as he refilled his pipe.
Cromwell Harris

This was a two-colour linocut of my Dad – Crom, as he was known – and it captured him perfectly. At Perth Modern School I had a marvellous art master called Frank E. Mills, known as ‘Effie’ from his initials. He was a real enthusiast and loved to paint and draw. He took me under his wing and one of the things he taught me was how to do multicoloured linocuts, a special love of his. I revelled in the fact that you had to do everything backwards – my signature here was cut in reverse so it printed the right way round!
Dad

I did thIs portrait with household emulsion. Dad’s face was just a delight to paint and worked wonderfully here. I particularly like the way the shadow area on the bottom left of his face runs straight off into the background, which is the same colour, so your brain has to determine where the edge of his face is. I was horrified to find, though, that when I got down to Dad’s hands I didn’t have room to fit them on the canvas! Bad planning.
Elvis Entertains

This was painted from a television show commemorating the fact that Elvis would have turned 75 in 2010 had he lived. I feel this picture really captures his huge appeal to the youngsters of the day and I love the two girls at the right of the picture, watching his every move with rapt attention. They are absolutely loving everything he does, loving the way he sounds and the way he performs.
Fish Hook

Our friend Robbie Briggs, known to all as ‘Fish Hook’ because of the Maori fish hook carving he wears as a pendant, agreed to pose for a painting alongside one of our ‘dream catchers’. When I started roughing in with turpentine on the blank canvas, he realised he was very badly affected by the smell and had to rush out into the garden to be violently sick. However, the painting progressed (without turps) and finished up as a wonderful likeness in a very relaxed impressionistic style.
Frankie Vaughan

The Variety Club of Great Britain asked me to paint Frankie Vaughan’s portrait to honour his years in show business. I remember going round to his house and covering the floor with three layers of newspaper so I didn’t mess the place up with oil paint! One of my best, I think, and done in one sitting. That red is a stunning colour on him.
Hamley’s Heaven

I was in Hamleys toy shop one day when I saw this little girl with her grandparents. She was in total bliss as she looked at all the toys around her. I love the way her yellow slicker turned out in the painting, and her glance back to her grandparents speaks volumes.
Ilse Poutsma

Ilsa had seen some of my other portraits and wanted one for her mum. It was a very good likeness.
Janet Holmes

Another Queensland girl, Janet was tall, statuesque and beautiful, with exquisitely long limbs and delightfully elegant hands. I was obsessed with a French artist called René Gruau at the time and this portrait was inspired by his fashion drawings of elegant ladies. I was determined to align the lines of the shapes, like the shoulders and neckline, with lines in the background, which I feel gives the painting a nice unity. This was another one of those portraits for a fiver, painted of friends.
Jeannie McNaught

Jeannie was from Queensland and my friend Alex and I, poor struggling students, used to go round to have a meal with her and her housemates from time to time. Jeannie gave me five pounds for this painting which she then sent to her mum, who thought it dark and gloomy and miserable looking. She said, ‘Get him to paint something more cheerful’. Jeannie’s mum shoved the unframed painting in a dark cupboard, face to the wall, where Jeannie found it years later. She has it to this day. I think it’s one of the best portraits I‘ve ever done.
Johnnie Blythe

I worked with Johnnie on a series of television advertising magazine programmes in the early 1960s, before such shows were banned. He and Sheila Matthews presented the items while I made quick sketches. I did some lovely pastels of everyone in my spare time, including this drawing of Johnnie in a relaxed mood.
June on the Stairs

June Thomas is an artist who worked with me on the Klimt programme in Rolf on Art and she was happy to pose for me in the nude at a later date. This is a portion of a much taller picture.
Little Old Lady

I was knocked out by this feisty little old lady who was sitting in a bus shelter, both her feet failing to reach the ground. I love the way the painting developed, with the various characters around her waiting for a bus and the young woman striding away in the background.
Marlon in America

This is a very happy painting of our grandson. It’s from a photograph taken of Marlon when we were all in America for a friend’s wedding. It was painted over a very rough undercoat, which gives it that lovely texture.
Mirrored Image

This is from a photograph taken on the same afternoon as the one for June on the Stairs. I’m always fascinated by seeing how the yellow colour of artificial light contrasts with the bluish hue of daylight. When I did the painting, I decided to use viridian green as the colour for the daylight and see what happened. I’m thrilled with the way it all worked – especially those shadows just under her right shoulder blade and under both arms. I love the pink colour on her bottom, which seems to be soft and perfect. It’s interesting that she herself is looking straight at the mirror, but in the mirror image her reflection is looking down to something else – an enigma. I don’t know how this happened.
Mr Danischewski

Danny, as we used to call him, lived near us in Sydenham. He was a gentle, loving person and my daughter Bindi, then a child, was forever going round to visit him and his wife, to play cards with them. This painting is exactly like him. I love the purple of his sweater. I remember I had to go and buy a special tube of paint, cobalt violet. You can’t get that colour by mixing blue and red – they just turn to brownish mud.
Mum

I did thIs portrait with household emulsion It worked perfectly from start to finish. I love the way the greeny-grey for the hair was also used in the curtains.
My Lovely Alwen

Alwen had bought some white chiffon material, which came wrapped in bright, orangey-red tissue. It was early evening, dusk was falling as she unwrapped the parcel, and I loved the picture she made. I told her not to move and rushed to take a photo to work from. When I got all my prints back from the chemist (which gives you an idea of how long ago this was), this particular one was really dark and quite blurry. Still, I got on with painting it and I love the impressionistic way it came out – the rough impression of Alwen’s hand and the lovely fragment of brown paper on the left. The latter was put in with just a couple of diamond-shaped splodges of colour, using a technique borrowed from Hayward Veal
My Old Dutch

Driving through Fulham one day, I saw this couple who had just come out of the pub. I imagined the conversation – her berating him for some thoughtless thing he had said, while he hung his head in silence. When I looked at the photograph I’d taken I was amazed at how like my dear Dad the man looked. I enjoyed painting this, especially the awkwardly reflected buildings.
My Two Loves

Most people don’t notice the top of our tiny daughter’s head in this picture, and the light shining through her ear. They mistakenly assume it’s only Alwen I was painting, and are consequently bemused by the title.
Nelson Mandela

I was asked to paint a portrait of the great man to be used as an auction piece to raise funds for his beloved charity, ‘My Acre of Africa’. I was supplied with three different photographs and this was by far the best, as it included the title of the charity. I loved my painting, but sadly, when I tried to get it to Nelson Mandela so he could use it to raise funds, a million hangers-on kept me from him. I was never able to hand over the painting so it was never used for its intended purpose. Shame.
Niki

I’ve always been very nervous about asking ladies to pose naked for me. But as I get older I think, what the hell, and I ask the question. Many of the ladies have agreed and I have done some paintings that I really love. In this one, I tried to paint in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec, with a lot of vertical lines unifying the picture.
Nude

A watercolour sketch I did at Hayward Veal’s two-week workshop. The model he’d hired would take up a pose and you had to do something in ten minutes, then leave it alone.
Quo

This was painted for the Status Quo management for an exhibition of paintings that were all to be auctioned for charity and later put into a book. I was given dozens of different photos of them and chose to work from this one. Subsequently, I became good friends with Rick Parfitt and I’d like to congratulate him and Francis Rossi on the OBE they received from the Palace in 2009.
Rembrandt’s Genius

This is part of a slightly taller painting, done from a photograph I took at the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam. This couple were engrossed in some of Rembrandt’s etchings and I caught the husband explaining a particularly fascinating detail to his wife. I love the brilliant reflection of the light from the glass of the picture behind the man’s head and the way it outlines his features.
Roger Whittaker

This is one of the best likenesses I’ve ever achieved and one of the happiest paintings I’ve done. I like Roger’s square jaw and the loose casual way the shirt is painted, leaving any detail for more important things. I worked in two colours – burnt sienna and burnt umber – and I had a brush for each one, some turps and a rag. Most of the portrait is white canvas left untouched and the whole thing was finished in an hour and a quarter.
Shadowgraph of Uncle Marcus

Around this time I started experimenting with this technique – outlining the shadows as accurately as I could, and filling them in with black paint. I reasoned that this would create an accurate image of the person. I believed I’d discovered something brand new – until I learned that Caravaggio had been doing it regularly some 400 years earlier!
Shower Bath for Two

Doris Monet when she was heavily pregnant with her daughter Simone.
Simone

Doris Monet’s daughter Simone who was the most beautiful baby.
Sir James Mitchell

Sir James, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Western Australia, was to open the first exhibition of our Saturday art club in Perth. Mum got me to paint his portrait in sepia and browns from a newspaper cutting. As the great man moved around the walls and came to my portrait, to my horror, my mother seemed almost to leap upon him and said very loudly, ‘My boy would love to paint you in the flesh’! It was the first I’d heard of it, but Sir James very graciously said, ‘Have the boy contact my secretary’. He gave Mum the phone number and I remember that nervewracking call as if it were yesterday. The secretary, from a great height, said, ‘Sir James can give you an hour from ten to eleven this Saturday’. I can remember thinking what a strange time that was to start the hour, but I determined that I’d be early. So, at twenty-five to eleven on the day, I was waiting outside Government House, and at twenty to eleven I took a big breath and bounced in, secure in the knowledge that I was twenty minutes early. SIR JAMES, THE GOVERNOR, HAD BEEN WAITING FOR FORTY MINUTES! ‘You must learn to be more punctual young man’ he huffed, and I was too excruciatingly embarrassed to explain my mistake. However, the portrait was a great success and still hangs in the gallery in Northam, Western Australia, the governor’s home town.
The Boxer

I used to frequent a fruit stall in Regent Street whenever I went to my agent’s office. One day, this lovely old man was sitting at the back of the stall, which was painted this vibrant red. He was an ex-prize fighter and I loved his face, his leather jacket and the fiver clutched in his left hand, as well as the brown envelopes and boxes in front of him. Everything worked.
The Connoisseur

We went to an exhibition in Dover Street one day. A lovely old man, briefcase in hand, came in and stood sipping wine as he looked at all the paintings. Unbeknown to him, I followed him and took many photos. Eventually, he went downstairs to see the pictures hanging and propped up against the walls and there I took the photo that became the basis of this painting.
The King Sings

This painting is from another scene in that 75th birthday programme. What a great entertainer he was!
The Queen, 80th Birthday Commemorative Portrait

I finished this painting in my studio at home and it took about two months to complete. I wanted to capture the lady herself and her warm personality, rather than do a formal portrait, full of pomp and splendour, and I think I’ve achieved that. I unveiled my portrait of Her Majesty the Queen on 19th December 2005 at Buckingham Palace. It was exhibited at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, from 20th December and later at the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. It was also exhibited at the opening of the New Australian National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in December 2008 when I presented the Annual Lecture on Portraiture.
The Smiling Manager

I used to meet this man when he worked in a shop in Maidenhead and for ages I tried to pluck up the courage to ask him if he’d pose for me. Then one day I discovered he’d moved on to another job and they weren’t sure where – doom and gloom for me. Some months later I went into a shop in Taplow and there he was, working as the manager. This time I jumped in with all four feet and said I’d love to paint his portrait, but I wanted him to wear the big glasses he used to have, which were marvellous. They seemed to show a double image of his face, with an extra set of ears. We arranged a sitting and I took photographs to work from, making sure that he gave me his biggest smile – uncovering about a foot of gum above his top teeth as he did so. I love this painting.
Uncle Olaf

This was a very happy pencil drawing of my dear Uncle Olaf, known to everyone as ‘Westy’. It was done as a preliminary drawing for a scraperboard illustration for my novel, Win or Die, and it captures him perfectly, as he pretended to look very fierce for his role in the story.
Well Met By Moonlight

The model, holding a CD case, was walking past a brilliantly sunlit window, but in the painting I muted the colour and made it moonlight. I love the decadent touches of red on the nails and lips.
Win or Die Scraperboard Illustrations

These are the sketches and the finished artwork for my first novel, 'Win or Die', set in the period just after the French Revolution.
Win or Die Scraperboard Illustrations

These are the sketches and the finished artwork for my first novel, 'Win or Die', set in the period just after the French Revolution.
Wrong Number Lulu

Alwen didn’t enjoy posing very much so the best time to draw and paint her was when she was fast asleep. I painted this picture of her when we were first married, and I kept thinking that the telephone would shatter the silence and wake her, hence the title. Lulu was Alwen’s college nickname
Sir Kyffin Williams

Kyffin Williams was one of the greatest Welsh landscape and portrait painters of recent years. My wife and I had always admired his huge paintings at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and would rush to see them as soon as we got there each year. We were both amazed at his enormous palette-knife paintings of Welsh mountains and hillsides. We had formed an image of the artist in our minds, imagining a huge bear of man with a flowing beard, but when we met him through a mutual acquaintance, he was nothing like that. He was quiet, charming and self-effacing and we immediately became friends. I wanted to paint his portrait and photographed him in his beloved chair with artificial light above and blue daylight coming from the open doorway in front. I used an image from one of the lovely pen and wash drawings of Welsh farm buildings and mountains that he gave us, to form the background. He saw a photograph of my painting shortly before he died of cancer and he loved it. He is sadly missed.

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