Love is all around: The work of Dan Llywelyn Hall
After painting the Queen, the Welsh artist has turned his sights on some of the most iconic love stories around
At first glance Dan Llywelyn Hall's latest exhibition seems a world away from the work he is most widely known for. Images of Adam and Eve, Roman orgies and Cleopatra's seduction nestling next to stills from much-loved films such as Casablanca and Dirty Dancing appear unlikely bedfellows to his landscapes or portraits of distinguished war heroes and the Queen.
But speak to the Barry-born artist and it becomes clear they are not so different.
"I've always interpreted couples, but mostly in terms of landscape," he tells Portfolio at the opening night of Love Scenes at London's Lights of Soho art gallery. "I've always had couples relate strongly to sense of place and how relationships formed and we attach that to a place. For me, that's an absolute timeless idea. There's great mileage in that for an artist.
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"We look at these images and we identify our own lives," he continues of his latest pieces. "Our first port of call is normally books or films and those love scenes stay with us, they form an idea of what relationships are and we build our own relationships on those, as a benchmark.
"These are framed ideas of how you can pinpoint a moment in time, from antiquity to modern film. They're no different in terms of time, but they are in terms of context, of how couples are portrayed throughout the ages."
It is this idea, capturing a "moment in time", that fascinates Llywelyn Hall. He is known primarily as a landscape artist, his style capturing the traditions of Romantics such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, with their emphasis on personal feeling, and the abstract imagination of Neo-Romantics of the 1940s, but has also won great acclaim for his intimate portraits.
A graduate of the University of Westminster, he was named the Sunday Times young artist of the year in 2004 and won the BP Portrait Award five years later. Not bad for a boy who only achieved a grade C in his GCSE art.
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"I was very complacent," he says. "And a bit stubborn. I didn't envisage myself painting until my early 20s. I always did it in a very plodding way. I sent off many submissions to AD 2000 which kept getting rejected – I just kept copying the pictures. I also did some illustrations for the wine columns at The Independent, but the art director kept wanting to change them so I thought to myself, 'I want to paint the pictures I want to paint.'"
However, despite the awards, his painting hasn't always met with acclaim – his 2013 expressionist-style portrait of the Queen was accused of turning the monarch into a Spitting Image puppet.
"When I sat with her, it was a very natural thing, very organic, and the portrait came out of that meeting – as if you'd met someone in the pub," says Llywelyn Hall, who, at 32, was the youngest person to paint the Queen. "She was very much like that. She had that ease about her. That's why she's still in the job – she's that person you can talk to; that person who's propped up in the bar waiting to chat to someone.
"She's met more people on Earth than anyone living so she's very au fait with meeting people, with conversing, and yet there's this desperately private person who wants to talk. The idea of privacy is something I wanted to put in my painting."
It is clear that changing his style to something more conventional was never an option. "Art is not a career. It's a lifestyle. It seeps into every part of your life and you have to be quite cutthroat about it," he says. "Ultimately what you're left with is yourself when you wake up in the morning and you have to address yourself and where you stand in the world, what's your position in it. And I've stuck to that.
"I very much think you make these portraits for the long run," he adds. "You're not making them for the short attention you might get in the papers when they're unveiled. You're looking at the long-term and what you might offer to the canon of portraits - the psychology of the woman. It's not for me to say what I think of the portraits before, but I was very keen to really make a psychological probing of what that woman represents in her own time and I believe that it will endure."
The Queen has never commented on the picture. "She probably hated it," says Llywelyn Hall. "I'm pretty certain she found it terrible, but that doesn't matter one jot to me. She may recognise herself because she gets the joke in terms of her as an image. I think anyone in the public eye ultimately understands realises they are living within the remit of the persona they portray, the person the media portray, and how they outwardly project that to the public eye. She's more conscious of that than anyone I've ever met."
The youngest artist to ever paint the Queen was also the last to paint World War I veteran Harry Patch. He sees the two figures as similar: "Two people foisted into scenarios they didn't necessarily choose, but the duty to them was critical.
"They're the people we look to – the people who stick around. Not the people who are overnight, pop personalities. We look to the bastions of our society, the ones who remain constant and unchanged, and that strength is something really for the whole of society, not just for individual people."
Further bastions of society will be on display in Hull this weekend, when Llywelyn Hall unveils Portraits at Sea, a series of portraits of seafarers from what was once one of Britain's biggest fishing hubs, as part of the City of Culture. Added to that will be a series of unveilings for Portrait Amnesty, featuring prominent figures from all walks of life. As well as an exhibition, a public auction will be held to raise funds for Amnesty International.
As with Scenes of Love, it is about catching that moment. "Anyone who goes and sits face-to-face with a painting has always a different sense of scale, sense of surface, a sense of the moment – sitting in front of the moment when that was made is a precious thing and it's unique to painters," he says.
"Social media makes us feel like there are whole swathes of people who are interested in what we're talking about, but they're not interested in the least. The way we engage with people is how we connect on an individual matter, that's what matters in the long term. Painting operates on that term – go into the room, see the painting and connect."
Love Scenes runs until 17 June at Lights of Soho, 35 Brewer St, Soho, London W1F 0RX. All 25 works are available to buy, priced from £800 to £14,000. A limited edition print series is also available. lightsofsoho.com
Portraits at Sea, Merchant Navy Club, 204 Ferensway, Hull HU2 8HY, an exhibition of portraits by Dan Llywelyn Hall and a documentary by Anne-Marie Conlon.