Portrait commissions
This page is about the portraits I’m making – people in the places where they work, live, or worship. Studies, offices, churches, and a barge.
The people shown here include lawyers, writers, publishers, a priest, a head teacher, and others who spend their working lives somewhere worth looking at properly.
The latest chapter of this work is Contain Multitudes, a portrait show at Burgh House, Hampstead, in 2026 which also unfolded online, one portrait at a time. If you would like to see what a body of these pictures looks like together, start there.
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How I work
In a nutshell, I visit you where you work, and draw while I’m there. I take a few reference pictures to work from later.
Past sitters include Hunter Davies, drawn twice over in the first-floor room he has worked in since 1963. Others have included an Oscar-winning actress and a Booker Prize-winning novelist, though those portraits weren’t done in their working spaces.
I aim to be unobtrusive, so you can just get on with what you’re doing. People have told me they forget I’m even there.
John-Paul was a welcome presence when he came to Galley Beggar Press. It was very enjoyable to talk to him and see him at work – and he was expert at letting us get on, and avoiding disturbance.
I was delighted (and flattered!) by the pictures he produced. He really managed to capture something of our spirit – and it’s been great to see how other people have reacted positively to the pictures and felt closer to our company as a result.
- Sam Jordison
I see you
In all my work, I like people to feel seen, and heard – witnessed, if you like.
Joel Levack and Andrew Clover with a portrait of Joel at work. (Picture: Toby York)
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I’m especially proud of what Patrick said:
A couple of weeks before I retired from full-time Big Law Firm work, John-Paul Flintoff came to visit me at work.
It was an unexpectedly moving meeting: I would be suddenly acutely aware that my career was coming to an end, that a change was afoot. The feeling came over me speedily and significantly, completely displaced me, knocked me sideways, left me winded, I had to sit down for a bit.
As my office was becoming less cluttered, as I had to work out what to take and leave, as I confronted the reality of what mattered to me now and into the future, as I thought about all the people I had encountered and the lives I had touched and the people who had moulded me, I was quite overwhelmed.
John-Paul handled it all in his stride, asked some questions, never intrusively, but cleverly, sympathetically, full of curiosity. In only a short amount of time, he captured my essence sufficiently to translate that into a wonderful portrait. Extraordinary. I hope never to forget that experience.
I am picking up that portrait this very lunchtime. I am extremely excited to be reunited with John-Paul’s art – I have seen it once, only briefly, and was transfixed. Not by the painting of me as such (as entrancing as it is) but how he as an artist had seen me, seen into me, seen right through me, seen what to use – and how – in the piece.
It’s remarkable, is it not, that we spend so much time at our work but very rarely visually record that?
Patrick posted that on LinkedIn, which was very generous. The comments in response to his post were gratifying:
“What an amazing record to have of your career. I’d never have thought of this as a way of marking such a transition but it’s a brilliant idea.” – Sara Cody
“So much of our lives spent at these desks. So much of our identity wrapped up in what we do” – David James Lister
“You’re someone who deserves to be thanked and recognised.” – Sophie Wardell
Pictures: Visitors to Burgh House, looking at portraits.
The finished artwork
I work with sketches on paper and digital drawing on the iPad. The finished pictures are printed by a specialist in Hoxton, east London, on museum-grade Hahnemuhle German Etching paper. Each print is signed and dedicated to you. That print is yours, and it’s the only one of its kind. I keep a single artist’s proof of every picture I make, outside any numbered edition, for my own records. There’s more about how that works on my artist’s proofs and editions page.
My artist’s proof of Hunter Davies at work, in the gallery at Burgh House.
Alongside the print, I send you a small printed booklet of the reference photographs I took during the visit. Sitters have told me the booklet becomes a second gift on top of the portrait – a record of a working day that would otherwise have passed unrecorded.
If I can’t come to you
Not everyone is within reach of a train, and not everyone wants a stranger with a sketchbook in the room. So I also draw people from life over Zoom.
I started doing this in 2020, when I couldn’t get into anyone’s office. It was a workaround. What I found was that it wasn’t only a workaround: people in their own space, on their own terms, are often more themselves than when I’m sitting across the desk from them.
The first thing I’ll ask is that you move back from the camera – often a long way back. Close up, I get your face and no sense of place. Six feet away, and I can see a person in a room.
Then we talk about what’s around you, and you photograph the things that matter while I’m still on the call – close up, while I can say what I need. I draw those in afterwards from your photographs.
Once I’m back at my desk with the photographs, it makes no difference whether I was standing in the room or watching through one. The looking is what differs. The making is identical.
I’ve drawn people this way in gardens, at kitchen tables, on the floor in front of their books – couples, families, whole groups. It also means I can draw someone in Taipei or Toronto without either of us getting on a plane.
You get the same signed and dedicated A2 print on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper. There’s no reference booklet, though – that comes from the photographs I take while I’m in the room with you, and remotely those are yours to take rather than mine.
What next?
If you would like to discuss a portrait, with no commitment, please jp at this domain name. I’ll suggest a time to talk.
Here’s what to expect if we go ahead:
Every commission is different – the room, the number of figures, how far I come, and how I work the picture up afterwards – so there isn’t one price. Tell me what you have in mind and I’ll tell you what it would cost.
For an in-person commission the price includes my visit to you wherever you work, the time I spend drawing both there and afterwards, one signed and dedicated A2 print on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper, and the reference booklet from the visit.
A remote commission includes the sittings over Zoom, the drawing time afterwards, and the same signed and dedicated A2 print. Additional prints, or prints at different sizes, can be arranged either way.