The Sunday Times Magazine article, featuring Mitch Griffiths

26 Apr 2010

Ray Winstone, the new face of British art

The hard-man actor from Essex steps into the frame for the artist Mitch Griffiths in his radical new series on the Union Jack
Written by Lesley White

At first you don’t notice the family resemblance. In the elegant Halcyon Gallery in Mayfair stand two portraits that stop you in your tracks: the flag bearer and his daughter. In one, a dejected young woman huddles in a grubby Union Jack like a battle-scarred Britannia. In the second, a film star stares out from his own red, white and blue cocoon, stripped of all assets except his expression of hard-won realism. The models are Ray Winstone and his daughter Lois; the artist is Mitch Griffiths, a man who is never going to win the Turner prize.

He paints with a high-gloss realism — straight onto the canvas with oils — producing portraits suffused with light and minute detail that evoke old masters and classical frescoes thrust into an uncomfortable modernity. He gives us hoodies, self-harmers and suicide blondes, their images as sleek as an adman’s pitch. He lives in Devizes in Wiltshire, but 15th-century Florence might have suited him better. In the self-referential world of modern art, he is unfashionably figurative, a polemical portraitist who starts with an idea, finding models who can convey the thoughts he scribbles in the notebook he keeps beside his bed.

His most recent work, shown here for the first time, features the hard-man actor from Essex. Ray Winstone is stony-faced in the picture; in conversation with me he is a big old pussycat, but whenever the camera was turned on him, his expression tightened into that familiar, bankable menace. “I had to tell him to soften it,” laughs the artist. The Flag Bearer is a gem in Griffiths’ new show, The Promised Land, which opens later this month. Is it an image of right-wing bigotry, of proud patriotism, or just of an actor wearing another costume between shooting the films that have made him a better export than the Jaguar XKR parked outside his (very big) house in the country?

“To me, Ray epitomises being British,” smiles Griffiths. “He’s someone people think has achieved a lot, but anyone could talk to him. He’s one of ours going over to Hollywood. He doesn’t see himself as a celebrity.”

Griffiths’ core subject is Britishness, the pursuit of identity in our post-colonial melting pot, the tainting and trashing of the sceptred isle, its use in thrall to the fast buck of celebrity, its self-obsession as ugly as an infected tattoo...

Click on the below PDF or go to http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article7097683.ece to read more

PDF Link: The Sunday Times Article

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