It amused me to make Ayla’s portrait lying down, reading a book on her office sofa. She wondered briefly if it might look bad to be caught reading horizontally at work.
I said that reading the book, Black Liturgies, could perhaps be considered part of her work.
“Yes,” she replied, “and it’s Lent.”
Revd Dr Ayla Lepine is Associate Rector at St James’s Piccadilly, the Christopher Wren church that was damaged in the Blitz in 1940 but never stopped working. She is both a priest and an art historian: immediately before this role she was a curator at the National Gallery, and she still gives the sermon at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition varnishing day.
Behind her in the portrait, above the sofa, a text-based artwork declares “We will get through this with art.” That is absolutely what Ayla believes. On her shelf, a small icon of Harvey Milk. Her congregation is diverse and inclusive, and the room reflects that.
The sitting was scheduled to coincide with a vast magnolia blooming outrageously outside her window. Ayla knows I have a thing for magnolias, and came to my magnolia show at Burgh House in 2025.
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In fact, Ayla is the reason a great deal of this exists.
A few years ago, after my breakdown, she commissioned me to draw more than 30 members of the Hampstead Parish Church congregation from life, in a project we called Be Drawn. Each sketchy portrait was created in just nine minutes, timed on my iPhone.
I made the last one on the day before I came down with Covid myself and lockdown began.
In psychiatric hospital I had been drawing myself a lot, trying to work out what was happening to me. Ayla’s commission helped to turn my work outwards. She put a lot of other people in front of me, one after another, and asked me to look at them. It was a lot of fun.
Everything since – the Zoom portraits I did during lockdown, the sittings at people’s desks, and, eventually, this whole gallery show – grew from that.
And that’s not all: Ayla was the first person to buy the collectors’ edition of A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown. You can see for yourself: her name appears at the top of the list of patrons.