Something I’ve been making for a long time is about to become visible.
From 18 to 23 August I have a portrait show at Burgh House, in Hampstead. It’s called Contain Multitudes, after Walt Whitman but without the I. The private view is a thank-you to the backers of A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown; everyone else is very welcome indeed, without charge, on the days that follow.
For the many of you who won’t be in London that week, the show is also unfolding online, one portrait at a time, from now. Same title, same pictures, but with room for the sitters’ own voices alongside – or whatever else the days ahead may bring. Melbourne and Marseille and Milton Keynes are all closer to Hampstead this way round.
The first one is Patrick. Read the full post, and hear me read it.
I was sitting in a low seat in the reception of a City law firm, surrounded by young people who had come in for interviews, when Patrick McCann arrived. Late – a problem with the bus. He worked his way round the room, encouraging them. Then he saw a young woman sitting on her own and went over to her. “We are looking for team-players,” he said, cheerfully, and she smiled shyly and stood up to join the others.
Only then did he come and get me.
We were meeting at 9am because his final month at Linklaters was so busy – he was, he thought, about to retire – that this was the only slot he had. I had asked at short notice, and he had said yes at short notice.
His office was on a higher floor. In the lift, as at the coffee counter downstairs, people smiled at him and engaged. Chatty Patty, apparently, was what he was called. He talked to everyone, he told me, always had. His father had done the same. “Five hundred people came to my father’s funeral. I want five hundred to come to mine.”
The room was in the middle of being emptied. On the cupboard by the window, a jungle of houseplants; along the walls, several awards. In one corner, ominously, a black municipal wheelie bin of the kind that stands outside London homes, waiting to be filled with whatever Patrick decided not to keep. He pointed out files from an earlier job. He pointed out a T-shirt bearing the logo of City Century, a charity he co-founded, and asked me to be sure to include it in the picture. He wore orange nail varnish, which was a gift to a picture-maker who likes colour.
I did not have long. I took reference photographs of everything and drew what I could. Patrick appears three times in the finished portrait: seated in an office chair on the left in his patterned top and yellow trainers; at the desk, hand to chin, mid-thought; and on the right, reaching up to a shelf. It was an office running out of time.
I sent him a detail from the drawing a couple of days later. His reply was one line.
“I’m loving it, not liking it. It’s so meaningful.”
When Patrick eventually came back from a long trip abroad, we met for lunch – him, his husband, his nephew – and I handed the finished picture over. That same day, he posted this on LinkedIn:
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 than 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?
That last line has stayed with me since. It could stand as a caption for the whole of Contain Multitudes.
There is one thing Patrick did not know when he wrote all of that. He was not retiring after all. Within a few months he had come back to work as CEO of the City of London Law Society. The bin, the emptying office, the goodbye to Linklaters – all of it was real. The retirement was not.
More portraits over the next fortnight, as the show opens. Next: Ayla Lepine, priest and art historian, whom I found lying on her office sofa in the middle of a working day, reading a book called Black Liturgies. It was Lent.
If you’re within reach of Hampstead in August, come. If you’re further away, the online show is for you – one portrait at a time, arriving in your inbox and on my website.
Reply to this email if any of it lands. I’d love to hear from you.