Life Story Portraits with Eileen Hogan
Autumn Term, sees the return of the Royal Drawing School's Creative Conversations; dialogues between artists, curators and writers. Lectures are held on Wednesday evenings at the School or online.
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Since 2004 Eileen Hogan has pioneered a unique approach to portrait painting by including an oral historian in her sittings. The triangular relationship - artist, sitter, questioner– sets her subject in animated conversation rather than frozen under the artist’s gaze. As Hogan concentrates on drawing, she is able to tune in and out of the dialogue yet is free from initiating or entering into it.
The life story methodology followed by the oral historian centres each subject’s professional life in an autobiographical context beginning with forebears and moving from childhood onwards while also encompassing important contemporary national and international events as they occur as well as those personal to the sitter. What Hogan absorbs seeps into her knowledge of and attitude to the sitter, affecting her depiction of them.
In 2019 Hogan was commissioned by Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford, to paint its then Principal, Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian newspaper. Her composite portrait of nine images reflects a period of exceptional volatility, including the 2019 General Election, the proroguing of parliament, Brexit negotiations, the explosion of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, the 2020 America election and its aftermath. Early sessions took place in Rusbridger’s office before being derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic and moving online, with Rusbridger based in different home environments, his hair growing shaggier, and, once, wearing layers of clothing seated in a freezing gazebo he constructed at LMH in order to greet new students safely. Final sittings took place in 2022 in Hogan’s studio. The composite portrait of nine images now hangs at LMH. The oral history sessions continue and are accessioned into National Life Stories, an independent oral history charity
housed in the British Library.
'Composite portrait of Alan Rusbridger', Eileen Hogan, 2019-22, oil and wax on panel, 102 x 90cm © Artist
Eileen Hogan’s retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art, USA (2019) was accompanied by a monograph, Eileen Hogan: Personal Geographies, published by Yale University Press. Her exhibition Strange Weather opens at Browse & Darby, London on 20 November 2024.
Alan Rusbridger is Editor of Prospect Magazine. He was for 20 years Editor in Chief of the Guardian and for six years Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.
Cathy Courtney is a writer and oral historian. For many years she wrote a column on artists’ books for Art Monthly. She established the oral history projects, Artists’ Lives and Architects’ Lives for National Life Stories at the British Library. She was co-curator with Elena Crippa of Artists’ Lives: Speaking of The Kasmin Gallery at Tate Britain in 2016-2018.
Cover image: Detail from 'Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby', Eileen Hogan, 2023, oil and wax on panel, 24 x 21cm © Artist
Please note our Autumn Term lectures will take place in-person at the School. Places are limited and prior booking is required, entry will be denied to anyone without a ticket.