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There’s a slightly saccharine quality to the results produced here, but it’s not something you couldn’t tone down in your own work. Books on portraiture are thin on the ground and on painting children even more so, so this is a particularly welcome gap-filler. There’s a good variety of hair, skin and facial types, as well as sound but simple notes on how to deal with the main facial features and step by step demonstrations that are thorough without being over-worked.

All in all, this is an excellent place to start and would probably also carry some welcome hints for the more practised artist.

North Light

Author: Victoria Lisi, Medium: Oil, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Children, Subject: Portraiture

Good portrait painting books come along all too infrequently and something which takes the subject seriously and looks at it in such depth as this is to be welcomed. Suzanne Brooker examines every aspect of portrait painting, from style to facial features and expressions to composition and painting methods. There’s a great deal to read here, but there are also plenty of illustrations to leaven and punctuate it so that you’re never left struggling for comprehension. There is a also a generous series of demonstration paintings which are described in some detail. Although, as a result, they have fewer stage illustrations than has perhaps become the norm, they are, I think, more suited to the more technically advanced artist, the sort of person who is likely to be going into portraiture seriously. In any case, the whole book is anything but an introduction for the beginner and will appeal to (and should satisfy) the more demanding reader. It is a large and quite heavy tome that rewards extended study and is admirably comprehensive both in its coverage and its execution of that coverage.

If I have a reservation, it’s perhaps that the style of painting tends rather heavily towards the old-master that’s (admittedly) implied in the subtitle, but it is an American book and American portraiture can be rather like that. I still think you can learn a lot from it, though and I don’t think you’d feel your money was wasted. If that sounds like faint praise, it’s not meant to be.

Author: Suzanne Brooker, Medium: Oil, Publisher: Watson Guptill, Subject: Portraiture

This is the companion volume to Simon’s very successful Body Parts, which appeared last year, and was planned at the same time. It features the same layout, with a huge variety of photographic images and artistic interpretations in a variety of media. Neither book is a step-by-step how-to of its subject, but rather an in-depth guide to detail work that is absolutely invaluable for any figurative or portrait artist. Using either book it is possible to dispense with a model for most work, allowing much greater freedom in terms of both time taken and variety of interpretation and experimentation.

Simon’s approach in all his books is simply to immerse the reader in visual material to the extent almost of sensory overload so that the subject simply takes over your consciousness. It’s a bold and brave way of working and won’t be for everyone; certainly I wouldn’t recommend this as a book for beginners, who are going to want rather more hand-holding than Simon has to offer. However, for anyone who is reasonably confident with their medium and materials, both books are an invaluable source of reference material as well as guides to methods of working.

Author: Simon Jennings, Medium: Drawing, Medium: Oil, Medium: Watercolour, Publisher: Mitchell Beazley, Subject: Faces, Subject: Figure, Subject: Portraiture

Books on portraiture are thin on the ground and any new one is a welcome addition to a select band.

I’m going to start with a couple of reservations. The first is that the style of the finished results is a little stilted and formal and the second is that it’s also perhaps a little sentimentalised. However, this is an American book and that’s how they do things.

I wanted to get that out of the way because if you found this is a shop and flicked through it, you might be put off and start to think , “Ooh, no, that’s not for me” and that would be a pity because the coverage and presentation are some of the best and most comprehensive I’ve seen. The book consists of a series of quite detailed demonstrations, each by a single artist, of specific techniques: skin tones, hair colours, facial types and so on. This allows the reader to concentrate on one thing at a time without having to hunt through the whole book to pick out the specific parts they’re interested in. Although the material has appeared elsewhere, it’s been re-edited to give it a freshness and immediacy that sets this book apart. It’s not, therefore, one you necessarily need to work through from cover to cover, but rather something to use for reference as specific needs arise.

Leaving aside the small initial reservations, the quality of the work and the reproductions, the number of illustrations and the detailed explanations of the progress of each drawing or painting are pretty near perfect. Even if some of the facial types may be less familiar to European eyes and the treatments not quite what we’d expect, anyone following the book should be able to develop the skills to adapt to what they want. Quite simply, if you want to paint or draw portraits, buy this book. It’s excellent value at 192 pages for £14.99 and you’ll get a huge amount out of it.

North Light 2007
£14.99

Author: Ann Kullberg, Author: Carrie Stuart Parks, Author: Chris Saper, Author: Cindy Agan, Author: Clem Robins, Author: Craig Nelson, Author: Greg Albert, Author: Jeffrey Blocksidge, Author: Mary Burzlaff, Author: Michaelin Otis, Publisher: North Light, Subject: Portraiture

Within the literature in general, not a great deal appears about portraiture in any medium and I’m not aware of any books that are devoted to it in pastel.

What you get in this rather excellent little film is a pretty much complete demonstration of a formal portrait, beginning from the basic sketch and building up the shape of the picture before adding colour. Gwenneth manages the none-too-easy skill of painting and talking at the same time and her commentary is both full and helpful.

Inevitably, you’re going to want other media and maybe a few other painting styles as well, particularly something less stiff and composed, but this isn’t really possible within the confines of a single programme and we can only hope that this DVD will be sufficiently successful to encourage other productions.

Although it’s tricky to translate techniques from one medium to another, this is probably worth a look (I think Amazon have it on their rental list) even if you’re not really a pastellist.

First published 2005
£17.99

Author: Gwenneth Barth, Medium: Pastel, Publisher: Beckmann Video, Subject: Portraiture

I haven’t actually done a count, you understand, but I’d put money on your being able to enumerate on one hand the number of books about artists which have been written by a clinical psychologist. This is not, however, a case-study. Keith Nichols was a friend of Lenkiewicz, but was also well-placed to understand the inner workings of a complex man.

Robert Lenkiewicz will be better-known to West Country readers than perhaps to those in other parts of the country and he was something of a local phenomenon. A tall, striking. figure with long greying hair he was described, on his death, by the Western Morning News as a “larger than life character”. This is, of course, what people say when they don’t know what to say and are fearful, also, of saying something bad about someone they feel to have been important, but don’t quite know why. Yes, the word “difficult” does crop up.

That’s how it is with Lenkiewicz. There’s no doubt that he was an artist of very considerable ability. His subjects are people and there’s a distinctly classic style about them, but overlaid with a much more modern approach to character and expression. Even off the pages of a book, these are startling images that look at the viewer just as much as the viewer looks at them. Quite often the subject is the artist himself and, from the several photographs that are included, he does seem to have had a very searching, even inquisitorial gaze.

It’s becoming clear that the man and his paintings go very much hand-in-hand and, as well as recording a great deal of Lenciewicz’s work, this book is also about the man as an experience in himself, with contributions from many people who knew him. It is, overall, an affectionate portrait, but not a blind celebration and it probably takes someone who understands the deeper workings of the human mind to pull that one off.

It would be easy to dismiss Robert Lenciewicz as a curiosity, a self-taught naïf who caught the public imagination for reasons sometimes wholly unconnected with his art, but whose work does not withstand critical assessment. It’s a difficult one. If you love figure painting then this is, I’d suggest, something you should look at. Make up your own mind about the man: this book will give you ample opportunity. I’d also say this is someone whose life deserves not to pass unremarked.

First published 2005
£29.99

Author: Keith Nichols, Author: Robert Lenkiewicz, Publisher: Halsgrove, Subject: Portraiture