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

Review Elizabeth Carr-Ellis

“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.

“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 University of Westminster, he was named
the Sunday Times young artist of the year in 2004 won the BP
Portrait Award five years later. Not bad for a boy who only
achieved a grade C in his GCSE art.

“I was very complacent,” he says. “And a bit stubborn. I
didn’t envisage myself painting until my early SC. 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
understand 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 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’s 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.

Portraits at Sea, Merchant Navy Club, 204
Ferensway, Hull HU2 8HY, an exhibition of portraits by Dan Llywelen
Hall and a documentary by Anne-Marie Conlon.