Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello. This is the Pearl Lam Podcast, and I am here sitting in Johny Yeo’s studio. It’s magnificent, really magnificent. So may I introduce Johnny? And Johnny, can you just give a brief about who you are, what you are up to, to the audience who it’s not in the art world.
Jonathan Yeo: Okay, so I’m Jonathan Yeo. I have spent 30 years painting. I guess my day job is painting faces because I find that most interesting. But as you know, I then spend probably half my time experimenting on other things, often also face related, but that has sometimes been making collages, sometimes making, doing works around plastic surgery and people kind of cosmetic surgery and what people do to change their appearance and the operations, going to watch sort of surgeons operate. And in recent years, I’ve done a lot of experimenting around technology and new ways of making portraits, but also everything from immersive experiences to apps to different kinds of 3D capture virtual reality to making sculpture and other things.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Johnny, you have been, you are self-taught, a self-taught portrait painter or have you gone to, you know, you know, who’s teaching portrait paint painting today? There’s hardly anybody, you know, hardly have any classes about portrait painting?
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, it’s funny. And people always ask me with a bit of suspicion that I about being self taught. And I’m self taught in the sense that I didn’t go and do an art degree. I mean, obviously I learned. I did painting at school when I was a kid and I carried on doing life classes through my sort of early years, but I didn’t do an art degree and part of that was because at that stage, and obviously now in the art world, there’s a lot of figurative painting, it’s become a much more mainstream thing again. But in the early nineties, when I was starting off…
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Conceptual, no one teaches you how to paint.
Jonathan Yeo: Exactly. It was really out of fashion. I mean, painting full stop was out of fashion, let alone figurative. And portraiture was a dirty word, maybe less, you know, and I think certainly in Europe, but maybe, maybe in China it was different, because I remember when I came to China with you, I remember, what, 10 15 years ago, and I was really interested in how many of the Chinese contemporary artists were, you know, happily embracing portraiture. They didn’t see it as an old-fashioned thing or kind of you as a retro thing.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because I think China, the syllabus, they follow the Soviet Union syllabus, so they still teach painting. But most of the syllabus around the world, international, Western Europe or America, has taken everything about painting out of the syllabus. And I was just told that even they are going to take out the drawings from schools. So in school, they are no longer going to teach drawings.
Jonathan Yeo: How interesting. Even a time when it’s becoming…
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Sad, really sad. I remember when I last had a very long talk and talk of you. You was telling me that you were trying to find these pigments, these colours, which is like the. Which is like the good old. I mean, the old master, like in the Florentine painting thing, and you were trying to find these pigments and how to create those paints. And I think one of the things that you were describing to me was, was doing your plastic surgeon series. You were using these paints and so that you can create that complexion.
Jonathan Yeo: Yes. So partly the paints. I mean, I’ve always been interested in looking at what techniques are not being used currently, whether it’s new techniques or sometimes looking back in the past. And one of those things was, yes, using certain colours, but also the mediums that they used to use. And so. And for those pictures in particular, to get the really, really soft kind of blending of skin tones to make them feel kind of eerily photographic, I found a technique where the old masters used to add clove oil to slow down the drying times, which is basically so you could. And this is a kind of good hack for artists. Basically, it’s with oil paint. It’s not as bad as acrylic, but it still dries in a few days. And actually, by adding a little bit of a much slower drying oil, you can slow that down to a week or even a week and a half, which means you can come in and keep on working into wet paint. It’s got to be used with caution because if you add too much, then the painting never dries and so it can cause other problems. So you have to have a little dropper and use it very carefully. But it’s interesting. You do sometimes by digging around what other people use or people use for other purposes, for commercial art or other things, you learn, you spot things which might be applicable to what you do and solve problems.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Johnny, recently you have. I mean, everywhere we read about you, I mean, with this King Charles’ portrait, and people either like it or they made really horrible comments about this red and the King Charles there. They said that, oh, it’s coming from hell. Hell and all that. You’re very calm, you’re not affected. I love the painting. Even when that you said, you sent me to this gallery to see it. When you have people having never. They don’t. They don’t appreciate that this is a contemporary world, right? So a contemporary, of course, is a contemporary interpretation of a portraiture. You’re not going to copy a style of like few hundred years ago to do that. So how are you addressing this? Do you care about what people say?
Jonathan Yeo: It’s a funny one because, I mean, I think, obviously when you do a commission of someone who’s so much in the public eye as the king is at the moment, especially given everything else going on in his life, you expect a bit of interest. So that wasn’t a surprise. But the scale of obsession about it was extraordinary. And I think I. As you say, I think the. I mean, you know, my work, it isn’t very different from the other works I’ve been doing over the years, I think. But then, of course, most of the world have an idea of what a royal portrait should be, because a lot of them in recent years have been these very traditional and quite stiff things. And I think the previous queen was not very interested in painting. She preferred photography. And so she was kind of like. I think I. A lot of those pictures feel quite cold and stiff and kind of slightly retrospective looking in their style and feel. But I think he’s different and he obviously knows my work and wanted me to do my thing with it. And the colour, I was trying to. The colour basically was interesting. People who saw it in the studio and you’ve seen it in the flesh. I mean, it’s not quite as exaggerated in the flesh. It’s a bit more subtle in the flesh than it is in reproduction. And part of that is the nature of digital photography and the way we look at everything on screens, that it exaggerates primary colours, but also in the flesh, it’s as much pink as red. And there are other colours as well. And so when it all happened, for the first few hours, well, firstly, they kind of like, yeah, it was everywhere. And that was exciting. And then the next day, you started getting all these comments about it being red, and I was like, hang on, people are missing the point of this. And, you know, all this stuff you think about, and then it just kept going. You think it’s going to die down. And it went on for days and days. It’s still being discussed weeks later. And I think it was the point about two days in where we started getting all these crazy conspiracy theories coming in about it. My daughters are 17 and 20, so they’re all over TikTok and they’re picking up stuff and sending it to me. And it was like, what? What is this? What is this? Like the satanic symbolism and all this? I was thinking, so,
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because it’s red, so it’s satanic.
Jonathan Yeo: And I think. I mean, I’ve learned over the years to expect a certain amount of unexpected interpretation and people projecting their own thoughts onto paintings, but I’ve never seen anything like this. And I don’t think. I’m certainly not in my work. I don’t think I’ve seen it in other people’s work so much. But I think it’s also an amazing moment in time when, you know, the fact that it was in the. Obviously when in the mainstream media, but also some kind of like, was it a caught the imagination of the sort of the teenagers, every generation saw it and argued about it. And as you say, some people loved it, some people hated it. Some people, certainly lots of people had different ideas about it, and that was the fun of it. Everyone felt the same way.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think the most important thing is you have become a hot number. This is the most relevant point, because painting, everybody has a point of view. And I think, you know, there’s certain expectation, as you said, because they always expected the royal portraiture, but you gave it completely different view. And the king loves it. Right? The king and Camilla love it. The most important thing is the person who’s sitting for it love the painting.
Jonathan Yeo: Well, I think so. I think. I mean, it’s nice what you say. I think the, you know, in a funny way, it suddenly went from something which was hidden in the studio for many months, and I was very careful about not showing it to people, to something which is completely public property. It went around, replicated billions of times around the world. The stats were insane. But I think reflecting on it afterwards, I think what’s lovely is that it’s a reminder that, that a painted picture, a painted portrait really connects with people in a way that we’ve got rather used to think so, used to photography and this saturation of images that we see every day. And actually, we read paintings in a different way, and it can affect us emotionally, clearly, sometimes more powerfully than anything else.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So, okay, how many times have you met King Charles? So how do you actually pick up his personality and paint? I mean, how many times do you actually meet a person to actually be able to paint the personality within the.
Jonathan Yeo: And that’s what you want. The idea of the painting is, regardless of what else you’re doing and what other stories you’re telling, you want to make sure you’ve captured that sitter and you’re getting there.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): That’s the most important thing that captured that person.
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah. And you can’t do that in one session because you don’t know they’re just in a particular mood that day, or they’re, you know, and people wear masks and, you know, especially when they’re sort of, when you meet them for the first time. And often it takes a few sessions to kind of break through that. I usually suggest to people, they kind of sit five or six times. I can still take lots of photos and work on it in between, but it’s really important to see them on different days. And that relationship between, you know, the artist and sitter to evolve. In his case, obviously, there’s always a fight with the busy people to get enough time in the diary, but we did four proper sittings. It also helped that I met him half a dozen times before he bought one of my works, before he’d commissioned me, and I’d done the portrait of his wife. And so we weren’t starting from scratch, I think, which helped a bit. And he’s a very easygoing person. He’s very. He’ll make you laugh. He seems to genuinely want to know about you. And he’s curious, and the conversation is very.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): He likes art, and he likes art. He loves art, which is fundamentally important.
Jonathan Yeo: Exactly. And so I think the sittings were easygoing. And he also let me sit in on a couple of his meetings to watch him doing other things, which is always interesting. And so it was just enough, I think, to get a feel for who he was, which I hope I did, and get a sense of this human being amidst all kind of craziness of the world he’s in.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You are a portrait painter. So what is the most important thing as a successful portrait painter to capture?
Jonathan Yeo: Well, I think a bit of it you kind of pick up over the years on. You accidentally learn by don’t getting it wrong and you work out a way of allowing them to show you who they are and then you try and show some of it in their face. You obviously make decisions about what they’re doing in the picture and what the composition is and where they’re looking and that sort of thing to help and how you light it is very important. And then sometimes you can add in elements of narrative. I don’t like paintings that are too complicated with other stories and other things going on. But to have a few little clues as to who someone can be interesting as well. If their clothes are important to them, then you include that. I mean, I often. If I don’t think their clothes are important, I sometimes kind of leave them out altogether, you know. And so I think you edit out what’s really relevant to that person and hope that the judgments you’re making are the same things that other people will recognise.
Pearl Lam: You know, recently I’ve been very interested in African art. So what I find out is when I go to Africa, everybody is doing figurative. Everyone. I mean, sometimes every day you see so many faces, head and all that, you just cannot see one from another. So what makes, you know, what makes you different, Johnny, is when we come and see, you know, you have this pale face and the colour that you use and. And all that. So it gives you a very different signature characteristic of what you do. So since when did you have that? How did you create that?
Jonathan Yeo: It’s a good question. I think I evolved it over time. And it may also be a partly because I wasn’t ever taught a method for doing it.
Pearl Lam: You find your language yourself?
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, and I think that. I mean, partly this is like one of the things I do. I think what people would recognise is the fact that I focus on some areas and not others and leave some suggested or abstract. Now, that’s partly because that’s the way I remember images. When I sort of remember a scene or a person, I don’t remember it all in photographic detail. I remember certain elements that were important. I was doing you. Now, obviously, the face is the most important part because we as humans, we pick up so much information in the face about who you are and what mood you’re in and what’s going to happen next and what you’re thinking and all that sort of thing. All the kind of nonverbal communication. But also your body language is very important. I don’t need every bit of detail, but to see exactly where your shoulders are in relation to your head and how you’re sat also tells. We pick up a lot of information from that too. And then your clothes, obviously, and how you do your hair is what you’re projecting. And so that’s relevant. And then possibly a little bit of the architecture and the sense of what the space you’re in might be important, might not be, but those are the sort of. On this scale of importance, really what I pick up on. And then anything that’s not important, I try to leave out. I think we also. I mean, I certainly like images where it’s not completely realist and in focus because I think to have a little bit left to the imagination also makes a more intriguing and makes you go back to it.
Pearl Lam: More intriguing. Absolutely.
Jonathan Yeo: And maybe on a different day you see it in a different way and so it becomes a slightly more living thing. And then the distorted colours are, I think was sort of something I initially did slightly by accident, by reusing canvases. But then I found that actually I preferred it to when I made them, very lifelike. And I think there’s something about the fact, you know, you are doing a painting, it’s not real life. You are making something which is a representation of someone. And to acknowledge that it is, you’re not trying to make it real. In a way, I think makes it a more interesting game you play with the viewer.
Pearl Lam: I mean, you do paint, but why collages? And why porn? You know, why porn? And why collages? Of course, porn is very, very current. Every. I mean, every generation. You have porn. But why collages? From painting to collages?
Jonathan Yeo: So the collages started because. Well, there were two things going on. One was that I’d often. So a lot of the paintings, some of them end up with a slightly sort of broken up stars, especially the older faces. But very often they’d start in this. You know, it’s partly because when I was teaching myself to paint by going and looking at other artists work, one of the periods I really loved was this of cubists and sort of kind of early expressionist paintings. And so that work influenced my own painting early on. And I’d still to this day, if I’m working very fast or doing an initial study of a face or figure will paint in that sort of way that looks like a bit of a patchwork. And so I thought one day, well, that it would suit collage. And then, of course, there’s a natural kind of progression of thinking as well. If you were making a collage of human faces and bodies, then the obvious medium to use is pornographic magazines, because it’s all skin tones. And so I had this idea, but then there wasn’t a particular reason to use it because I didn’t think any of my normal portrait subjects would thank me for making a collage of them out of porn instead. But I had this commission, which was for President Bush, which is in the kind of nearly 20 years ago now, which I’d started, and they’d got in touch with me about.
Pearl Lam: How did you and Bush connect?
Jonathan Yeo: Well, in the end, I never met him. They came to me about doing this commission for the Bush library, presidential library, and I had to send all this information about me and answer all these questions and send these preparatory sketches and stuff. So I was looking at all these images of him. And then when he won his second term, it kind of went quiet and they wouldn’t return the calls and everything. And I was thinking, oh, yeah, I’ve wasted my time on this. So it sat on the shelf for a while, and then one day I thought, well, actually, let’s have a go at the collage. And that would be. I don’t mind doing it of him, because I don’t really care if I upset him or the people who commissioned it.
Pearl Lam: So you use the porn?
Jonathan Yeo: Exactly. And the initial idea was to, if it went well, first, I didn’t think it would take very long, which I was wrong about. It was very slow, because you have to basically make all the decisions you make doing a painting. Do it all over again with finding the pieces of paper in the magazines that match the colours. And preferably ones where you can also see a little bit of detail of what’s going on. So, you know, it’s from pornographic magazine. Otherwise you lose the fun of that. Anyway, so it took a long time, but actually it turned out better than I expected. And my idea was, well, yeah, maybe I could actually send this over to them and they. And see if they notice. You know, maybe they’ll put it up on the wall and won’t notice it straight away. So that was my plan. But in the end, what happened was I had Steve Lazaridis, who met, came out of the studio one day, with Damien Hirst and various others, and they saw it and said, yeah, you should. We should do something fun with this. And so he ended up. That was about 2007, so it was just the start of things going viral. It hadn’t happened to any of my work before because Steve was doing Banksy and all the street artists at that time and had this network of underground websites and bloggers and everything. So it went all over the world in a couple of days, which was fun, but it’s lost the element of surprise because obviously the White House were getting rung up for comments about it.
Pearl Lam: I love it. Okay, so you’ve done that. I thought that for portrait painter to do this is quite avant garde. Then next thing, when I met you at the time, you have just completed your plastic surgeon series, so don’t you think that now is more appropriate? And then during the time, because now, I mean, doing plastic surgery is so common. So what makes you do the plastic surgery series?
Jonathan Yeo: That’s a good question. So it was actually one of my surgeon friends who was a kind of artist in his spare time, who pointed this out to me, and I thought he challenged me. He said, if Leonardo is alive now, this is the subject matter he would be most interested in, because it’s cutting edge of medical science, on the one hand, but it’s also unnecessary. People aren’t doing it to fix problems, fix something that’s wrong with them. They’re making changes to their body, which are aesthetic judgments about what’s going to make them happier. And sometimes it’s actually the aesthetic judgement of the surgeon rather than the subject. So that bit was interesting. There was also the interest that when he started showing me the sort of the kind of pictures, the material and patients, and that the, before the surgery, they mark the bodies with what they’re going to do. And I like that particularly because that was, on the one hand, obviously, it’s literally a surgeon as an artist, making, you know, using the human body as a canvas. But then, of course, there’s the slight implied, you know, violence, really, of the fact these casual sort of felt tip marks were where a knife was going to be going through a few hours later. And so you had this sense of like, you know, impending drama to come. And then I also obviously like the idea of going, being allowed in to watch the cosmetic surgery operations, the facelifts, because I’ve spent so much of my life watching, looking at faces from the normal way around, see how they work underneath, I thought would be really interesting, which it was. But I think all these reasons made me really keen to do it. But I think in the end of the day, what was most interesting and why I do go back to it every few years is that it’s the psychology of it which is the end. That one of the reasons people feel the need to do these procedures, which are expensive and sometimes risky or don’t always go according to plan, that people get addicted to it and then doing it. There’s so many elements of psychology. What are the pressures we feel from society? Or is it we feel it from ourselves? I think everyone’s obsessed with ageing and that seems to be the underlying kind of common theme. But also then you dig a bit deeper and find that there’s, you know, at different parts of the world, people do different things. You know, in the, in, you know, in Europe, people want to do it, but they make it as subtle as possible because they don’t want to advertise the fact they’ve been doing it. But in actually Eastern Europe or, you know, Brazil and places like that, they’re very happy for people for it to be noticeable because it’s a fashion thing. So that was, that. That was really interesting. And, and then that you get the sort of trends of, you know, different, slightly different looks in the sort of mid-nineties. It was like to have massive obvious breast enhancements and certain things which were sort of the time, and then it went the other way. And then in recent years, it’s been much more about sort of gender reassignments and kind of things surgery to do with sort of other things going on in society. People removing traces of their sexuality at all by removing their nipples and things like that recently. So I think there’s an interesting thing where this is. Yeah. Surgery is actually a predictor of cultural shifts in society.
Pearl Lam: Wow. Okay. Then I saw your recent work when I last came. I really liked it. And then explain, because you’re using a lot of technology as well to create those work. So explain those work because it’s really interesting, because I always thought, oh, Johnny is portraiture. I want to do a show with Johnny, but portraiture is not really my gallery thing. And then when I saw those, I thought, brilliant.
Jonathan Yeo: So, I mean, I’ve always been a little bit of a geek and always interested in trying new technologies, whether it’s like just camera capturing or three. I got into three-dimensional capturing seven or eight years ago, and then I worked with Google on a 3D drawing software which they were developing and ended up making using that for a different purpose than it was intended by working with Pangolin. And we ended up making this, using it to design a sculpture which hadn’t been done. The bronze, which is downstairs you saw, which was in the show at the Royal Academy, we just made it in time for their 250th anniversary show. And so I carried on experimenting with the ways of using new technologies to do portraiture in different ways. And those works, the latest lot of work has actually been experiments going on for several years, but it’s around you doing 3D capture, but getting it wrong. So using handheld 3D scanners and deliberately messing it up so that the algorithms can’t work out what it’s trying to capture. And I love the fact that some of them would come out almost like abstract expressionist paintings, but you can still see some of the digital artefacts, and I’m still working out how much to use them in the pure digital form, how much. I mean, I’ve tried doing like that, done some as paintings. I think probably the work which hopefully we might end up showing will be stuff which combines the two. It’s got a bit of the digital and a bit of painting, but I just love that there’s also that thing of paradox of progress, that the technology gets better, but doesn’t necessarily improve the outcomes you’re looking for. So basically, I went back recently to make some more scans in the same way, thinking about, I’ve got an idea now, do some new ones. And they’ve upgraded all the software, they’ve upgraded the cameras, and now they, because they were all self portraits, they all look like me. And so it’s like, I can’t. That moment in time a few years ago when I made all those scans, luckily I kept a lot of them, was before the technology was good enough to do what it was trying to do. So actually it’s sort of.
Pearl Lam: So it’s just like stopped in time?
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, exactly. And so it’s like progress doesn’t always get you better results than the sort of earlier stages of it. And so I think that’s quite a nice little story about technology as well. It doesn’t always get better.
Pearl Lam: And how about AI? Are you thinking that AI would enhance your, will help you, inspire you, or completely taking all that away?
Jonathan Yeo: I mean, I mean, that’s a whole. We could do it, we could do a whole podcast just on AI. I think I’ve sort of dabbled in AI for quite a few years and always found it quite disappointing. I can see what the potential it might be one day, but then suddenly, obviously in the last couple of years with sort of mid journey and those sort of things. It’s got a lot better quicker. We’ve done various experiments trying to teach train an eye model on my style, and it’s got better at replicating the style. But what it can’t do is work out the faces. It can’t make the same judgments about a face that doesn’t know which bits to exaggerate, distort, keep the same. Although they did do an interesting project recently with Snapchat where they trained, because they’ve got, very obviously you’ve got a big team doing AI, but also their platform is all about portraiture. And I know the CEO, Evan, we talked about this relationship between his technology and portraiture, and they trained an AI model on my work. And the results have been really good because it does seems to have learned the style quite well, but also keeps the features of the face in the right way. And so that is something which I think they’re going to be launching soon. And I can show you some of the.
Pearl Lam: I would love to see. So you are saying that actually, AI actually is supporting your work?
Jonathan Yeo: I’m ambivalent about it because I think this. Yeah, I think it’ll make artists lazy. I think you can get results so quickly and, you know, it’s AI. It’s an amazing way of trying out ideas. Yeah. Almost always what it throws up isn’t what you were looking for. Sometimes it’s, you know, it’s more interesting. Often it’s just bit weird. But it’s. I think there’s a danger with AI, not just in kind of my area, but in music and everything else, that it’ll make us a bit lazy and less imaginative ourselves. I guess the danger, it’s not necessarily a certainty. I think it’ll take a lot of work away from graphic artists and storyboard artists and all that sort of thing that’s already happening. I think it’s potentially an interesting tool. I mean, I think I’m not scared of it. I think I feel some people are scared of it. I think it’ll be a tool that we start using a lot like photoshop’s become that. But I think it needs to be treated with caution. I think the other thing that worries me is that as visual artists, probably my work, certainly a lot of artist’s work has been used to train these models. None of the artists get any recognition or credit for that. And there are lots of big AI companies now making a huge amount of money out of it all. I think that feels a bit unfair to me.
Pearl Lam: That is absolutely right. But, you know, but you are using hand to do the work. So a lot of conceptual artists will be absolutely killed because the AI can do the job. Right? Because if you think about conceptual artists, most of the work is not done by the hand, it’s by someone else. Then all of a sudden is because AI can do so many, so many other artworks. So your hand, your craft becomes so much more important.
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, I think. Well, I think it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves. I think that the. Probably. I like to think that it’ll evolve in a way that you’re drawing and what you make is enhanced rather than the AI doing the whole thing for you, because I think that’s where it’s more interesting. And there’s some artists who’ve done some really interesting experiments around that. There’s a guy called Scott Eaton who does brilliant things using generative adversarial networks. You’ve got artists. I mean, also, obviously there’s people like Rafik Anadol who are doing something quite different. Again, I remember going to his studio in LA before COVID and being amazed at the scale of his.
Pearl Lam: Oh, did you see his work when he was doing it two years ago here?
Jonathan Yeo: Yes, I’ve seen that one,.
Pearl Lam: It was amazing. How do you see portraiture going to be in the next centuries?
Jonathan Yeo: That’s a really interesting,
Pearl Lam: Because, you know, we have the photograph, when the photograph came out, all the portraitary styles change, and you don’t need to paint people as it is. You paint their character, their personality, their spirit, whatever. So the realistic, whether the portrait looks realistic or not is no longer important, but what you are doing is you tick in to the classical way of interpretation, but you put something different in. So what do you think in the future with the AI, with all that thing, with all that technology coming out?
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, I think it will change, but I think some things will stay consistent. So one of the other hats I wear is I’m on the board of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and one of the things we have to think about is how to anticipate how AI and other technology is going to affect the kind of position and portraiture in the coming years and the type of work that’s going to be made. It’s difficult. I’d say. If I was to make general predictions, I’d say that our relationship with photography will shift. I think it’s already happening because it’s become so much more disposable every day. I take my kids to the National Portrait Gallery, and they’re not really interested in looking at photos because they see them as disposable things that just go through your social media feed. They love the paintings, the sort of physical things that have been made. And so. And I think there’ll be so many new ways of capturing that. Photography will seem, I think as a slightly. Yeah, will seem like a 20th century thing. If I was to make a prediction, I’d say that the three-dimensional world will become a much bigger thing in the 21st century.
Pearl Lam: Absolutely.
Jonathan Yeo: Sculpture, architecture, virtual works. I think it’ll get so much easier to 3d film. Exactly. I think basically it’s been harder. You need more resources in the 20th century to make 3d works. It was expensive. You needed space, you needed the materials, and you needed someone to believe in this vision that you had. Whereas you’ll be able to design things really fast in VR, show it to someone and they commit to it, then you can make these fabulous things and there’ll be more ways of viewing them. We just got the Apple vision headset.
Pearl Lam: It’s very heavy. I tried on.
Jonathan Yeo: It’s a bit heavy. It’ll get better in the next few years and people will start using these things like they use their phones now of the sort of content we can consume in lots of ways. In terms of how portraiture changes, I like to think that there’s still going to be a sort of value in the authenticity of the sense of something that’s been made as a document of a relationship between two people. It’ll get easier and easier to say pearl lamb portrait in Jonathan Yeo, or pepper Picasso or Mark Quinn, or whatever the style is, and it’ll come out, spit it out like that. But I think they’ll be lacking that sense of the real experience that was there. And the AI, I think, is many decades away from really, really thinking and understanding the emotional understanding we have and the baggage we bring and the cultural references we have when making something. It’s just a remix engine, basically. So I think that the kind of the human.
Pearl Lam: Interesting.
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah. The document of the human relationship being done in a way, but I suspect it’ll end up constantly reacting to new technologies and, you know, kind of weaving.
Pearl Lam: A way around it, because like a contemporary world, you always evolve in accordingly with today is technology.
Jonathan Yeo: Yeah, exactly.
Pearl Lam: Johnny, you have been painting all these prominent figures and all these, you know, famous, famous people. So who will be the one that you really wanted to paint? Give me a work per person. And how long do you need to know that person? Sit with that person that you can paint their emotional level or their personality reflecting.
Jonathan Yeo: I should have an answer for this because I do sometimes get asked. I don’t go around with a sort of like a hit list of people I like to paint more than others. I guess there are certain types. I think there’s, I mentioned it in sometimes accidental political figures, people who’ve ended up affecting the world, but not necessarily by choice. I’ve had a Malala Yousafzai, Doreen Lawrence, and a few others who have been, become influential figures. I guess at the moment you look at people like Greta Thunberg or Zelensky and people who thrust into positions or ended up in positions where they’re becoming actors on a world stage. I think the people, the thing I enjoy most is painting other artists in terms of just the process itself, because I always learn stuff from it. Peter Blake and Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry and various other artist friends. I mean, I’ve always trying to persuade Tracy Emmon to sit for me, but she’s kind of. She hasn’t succumbed so far to my persuasion. But there are quite a few artists, some of, like Tracy, who I know, but also others who I don’t know. I like their work, and I’d be really interested to see how they’re, you know, what they, what they’re like to spend time with and whether, you know, because part of the process is you discover who people are and generally you like them more at the end of it, but sometimes you like them less, you know, or they turn out to be very different from what you expect.
Pearl Lam: Do you have someone that after you paint, you know, have several seating and you just couldn’t wait to kick them out?
Jonathan Yeo: Yes, quite a. Quite a few. I can’t, obviously can’t tell you who they are.
Pearl Lam: So did you kick them out?
Jonathan Yeo: Well, I certainly kind of rushed to finish things when I haven’t been enjoying them, but that doesn’t happen. So that was more early in life, I think, because nowadays I’m in, obviously, in the lucky position that there are a lot more people wanting me to paint them than I’ve got time to do. I can’t scale, I can’t speed up just because more people want it, which means I end up being a bit more choosy about who I paint. And that was. So I try to either make sure that someone I know knows them, or if they come to me cold, that I get a. Get them on the phone or get to meet them and just get a sense of them before committing to it. Because usually the sort of people who come and think of doing a portrait are sort of unusual and quirky and interesting people. But if you get it wrong, or worst of all, if you just find it boring, if there’s no spark between you, then the process is boring and it ends up with a bad picture and it takes too long. And so you have to try and weed out the ones you don’t think you’re going to enjoy.
Pearl Lam: Every day you’re going around, and you must be seeing a lot of different faces, you know, especially you’re travelling around, don’t you want to paint one of those faces? And if you do, what do you do? You will go up to them and say, will you come to my city? Actually, I don’t have time.
Jonathan Yeo: I did a bit of that early on in life and some people would often, like, think, who’s this widow? These days I find I’m just staring at people, trying to figure out what’s interesting about their faces. If I’m with my kids, they get embarrassed because I’m staring at strangers in public, who then notice I’m staring at them. But the. I should say, I don’t just paint sort of famous people, they tend to be the ones that get talked about. But that’s probably only about 20% of what I do. I often paint friends, family, and sometimes people I meet who I just think are interesting. And inevitably, what you’re looking for in a subject is someone who is interesting and also has an interesting face. The two things often go together, but not always, but when you meet someone like that, you try and find a way of getting them in to be part of. To be in a picture.
Pearl Lam: Thank you, Johnny, for having us here and it is a wonderful talking to you.
Jonathan Yeo: Thank you, Pearl. It’s a great honour, as always.
Pearl Lam: Thank you.
