Quiet confidence

Quiet confidence

Another episode of Portrait Artist of the Year on the video yesterday, and more thoughts about photographs: with a touch of concern on my part.

It was a semi-final from 2019, with nine painters working for four hours to portray Courtney Pine, jazz musician. He sat holding a well-worn saxophone he referred to as his girlfriend – can you refer to a musical instrument as ‘brassed’ in the same way as my Contax is? Whatever the term for a brass instrument with a thoroughly-foxed finish, it was, and he held it with a love and confidence that I understand very well. Much-loved and trusted.

His expression conveyed the same confidence – a man at ease with himself and his art, someone who knows that on his day, he is as good as anyone in the world at what he does. Not complacency, I felt, because there was an inner glow suggesting that he relishes every day, and he glows with gratitude for his talent. At the end, he said that it was the longest that he’d held the instrument without playing it. I can relate to all of that except the bit about being the best in the world!

A pianist once said that if he didn’t practice for a day, he noticed: if he didn’t practice for a week, his manager noticed: and if he didn’t practice for a month, the audience would notice. It’s like that. You both want and need to go on doing what you do, and it’s irrespective of whether you have an audience or a market, I think.



And here’s the unease: I believe that I have three genuine talents to compensate for my many, many imperfections. I was a really good audit manager, and could finesse good results from unpromising circumstances. I am sad to have retired. I can write half-decently – and that’s something that I’m doing more of at present, with this blog. And I have a minor ability for taking portrait and nude pictures, the latter usually as a sub-genre of the former, in many ways.

And I’ve not practised that art since early October last year. What I do best, I think, requires being face to face – it can’t be done remotely, because the delays and loss of subtlety of a video call rob the situation of its immediacy: a camera on a tripod makes the tiny adjustment of angle and framing impossible. What if I can’t do it any more when I start again in a couple or three months?

As we watched the painters, I said this to my wife. For nearly 42 years, the marriage deal has been that I don’t ask her to carry cameras or tripods, and that when I take her picture I hurry up and get it over. The good news: she’s said that if I’m not bossy, she’ll be my model. I said she’s on, if she doesn’t keep telling me to hurry up.