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Issue Number: 117
Richard Cork meets the Royal Academician as he takes a break from preparing for his show at the National Portrait Gallery
As he drives me to his south London studio, Humphrey Ocean RA passes Dulwich College and says: ‘That’s where Raymond Chandler went to school, and learned how to place a verb.’ Clearly fascinated by his surroundings, he continues: ‘Dulwich is leafy and the village is like Williamsburg, the quaint historic town in Virginia.’ But Ocean’s studio is in part of a light industrial trading estate that is dominated by what he describes as ‘a beautiful Art Deco building where Pye radios were made. There are 90 trades based here, so you can get almost anything done.’
Humphrey Ocean RA in his south London studio, 2012. Photo © Robin Friend. Ocean has occupied his first-floor studio for eight years. Its size, quietness and luminosity still appeal to him: ‘I like the fact that I’m very undisturbed here, but I’m not isolated,’ he says. ‘It was wonderfully empty when I first came here, but now I would love to have an office and a gallery as well.’ Ocean needs all the space he can get at the moment: he has been working on an extended series of portraits for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. ‘I was going to do 1,000,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘but I’ll only show about 30. The temptation is to put them up like postage stamps, but they benefit from being isolated.’
Ocean’s links with the NPG go back to 1983, when he was commissioned to paint Paul McCartney. Subsequent portraits for their collection included Philip Larkin (1984) and Tony Benn (1996), but as Ocean wryly recalls, ‘When I left art school in 1973, I was told not to paint portraits. My teachers were Abstract Expressionists and they thought that, in portraiture, the tail is wagging the dog. So I thought: “Okay”, and I didn’t do any commissioned portraits for ten years. Peter Blake told me in 1976, “portraiture is wide open and nobody will do it.” Raymond Chandler took pulp fiction – that very lowly art – and transformed it. But even when I began to do commissions, I was absolutely aware of the shortfalls. I did one a year for 15 years, and I wanted to see whether it was possible to make something. If I became excited by making portraits, that might be transmitted.’
When I ask to see some of his recent portraits, Ocean produces a series of large and vigorous images painted in gouache on paper. Why this medium? ‘You can get this fantastic flatness, and it’s opaque’, he explains, describing how his sitters – friends, family and professional acquaintances – all come to his studio. ‘They are all seated, and each portrait takes an hour,’ he says. Free, direct and simplified, the works have an immediacy that is very refreshing. ‘When I’m doing them, I have no idea what I’m doing. I surprise myself, and I’m painting them for myself. I’ve only done two commissioned portraits over the past 10 years, so it was rather lovely when Rosie Broadley [associate contemporary curator at the National Portrait Gallery] got in touch with me about three years ago. She had seen some of these paintings on my website, and asked me to work towards this exhibition. It’s given me a new lease of life.’
The spontaneity of Ocean’s approach gives his images a remarkable vitality. How does he go about the act of painting? ‘It’s very odd,’ he replies. ‘I start making these things, trying to catch up as quickly as I can with a particular moment and getting it down. But thank god I’m not a camera – I have a beating heart.’ In other words, Ocean would never want to produce a predictably photographic painting: he is determined, above all, to convey his own imaginative response to the subject, yet emphasises: ‘I want precision rather than sloppiness.’ He never flatters his sitters. His daughter Ruby is seen smiling with her laptop, but the other figures are notable for their stillness. Ocean points to an impressive painting of Geoffrey Rigden, whose eyes are almost closed. ‘He taught me at Canterbury art college. I nearly destroyed it, but my eldest daughter prevented me, and now it’s my favourite.’
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