[ Note: I’m writing this series in real time, and a few links below aren’t yet live – sorry! ]
Years ago, I used to teach a class called How To Be More Creative, at The School of Life in London. The class lasted two and a half hours, with a break for coffee.
Sometimes in that class I would ask participants to draw each other, in pairs. I gave them just one minute, and pointed out what must have been obvious – that the finished picture would be quite rough.
I loved to watch as they worked hard to produce a “good” picture. Many would stare intently at the paper, rather than actually look at each other.
When the time was up, I would hear lots of apologies – as if they had failed each other somehow.
Then I told them what I’d seen – particularly the bit about not looking at each other. And I gave them a fresh challenge. This time, for just one minute, I wanted them to draw each other without looking at the paper, not even a glance.
This version produced a lot of laughter. It’s true that some people looked uncomfortable staring at someone else – and being stared at. But the drawings they produced this second time were almost always more satisfying than before.
Wonkier, but more full of life.
***
I think I must have mentioned this, once, to Ayla Lepine, when she was a priest at Hampstead Parish Church. I’d got to know Ayla after coming out of psychiatric hospital. I liked her enthusiasm, and her sermons. I knew she had a background in art history, and I guess that’s why I told her about that drawing exercise.
She seemed quite grabbed by the idea. Something about people feeling seen.
And she asked if I might do a project for the church – drawing members of the congregation. I said yes.
She called it Be Drawn. Nine minutes per portrait, timed on my iPhone. I ended up making more than thirty pictures over a couple of Sundays. I made the last one on the day before I came down with Covid myself and lockdown began.
The point of this story is that Ayla’s commission turned my work outward. In psychiatric hospital, as I’ve described elsewhere, I made hundreds of pictures of myself in an attempt to understand what was happening to me.
Ayla put a lot of other people in front of me, one after another, and asked me to look at them.
It was fun.
***
In lockdown, my agent Jaime Marshall introduced me to a private members’ club, in Soho, that was running an emergency fundraiser for local homeless people. I offered to draw members of The Union, on Zoom, with proceeds going to the charity.
Again, more than thirty people took up the offer.
We would meet on Zoom, and I drew them while we talked. One of the last was Olivia Colman, the Oscar-winning actor. I’ve still got a recording of our encounter.
It was quite hair-raising, because until she actually appeared, I had no idea if I’d be drawing that Olivia Colman or another one, and I didn’t want to look disappointed.
***
A couple of years later, I mentioned drawing Olivia Colman to Mark Ellingham. We were walking on Hampstead Heath. Mark was with Wooster, his English setter, and I had my schnauzer, Peanut. Mark is the co-founder of an independent publisher, Sort Of Books, and also works with Profile, where he was editor of one of my own books, Sew Your Own, a while ago.
On that walk, perhaps prompted by my reference to Olivia Colman, Mark mentioned that one of his authors had won the Booker Prize. I was amazed, thrilled, and a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t realised that Shehan Karunatilaka was a Sort Of Books author.
Mark said Shehan was flying to London soon to collect the prize.
I don’t know what possessed me but I asked if I could come and spend the day at Sort Of as an artist in residence.
Mark said he would ask Nat, his wife and co-founder, and Shehan. They said yes. I made pictures of Shehan at Sort Of HQ.
Then more visits to publishers. Julian Rothenstein at Redstone Press. Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring at Eland Books. Sam Jordison and Elly Millar and their dog Sirius at Galley Beggar Press in Norwich. Nine women meeting at the office of Slightly Foxed, in Hoxton. The wide office at Pushkin Press. Charles Boyle alone at CB Editions, in Shepherd’s Bush.
Watching how they ran a small press, particularly the ones who operated from a room in a house, gave me the nerve to publish A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown myself, as a limited edition without an ISBN.
Having started to make portraits of publishers, I approached others working in very different places. Patrick McCann, packing up his office at Linklaters ahead of what he thought was retirement. A head teacher (my university friend Jane Lunnon) standing in front of a wall of her all-male predecessors. A couple of artists, Jo Wood and Steve Chapman, arranged loosely after Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, with a stuffed raven where Percy would have been. A writer and actor, Andrew Clover, in a pirate’s bandana on a barge on the Thames. Mary Ann Sieghart, journalist and author of The Authority Gap, in her Wiltshire office in a jumper she knitted herself. And Mark Stephens, the media lawyer I first interviewed as a magazine writer, thirty years earlier.
It’s a funny thing, to meet people with a sketchpad instead of a reporter’s notebook. Very similar, but very different.
In January 2024, I found myself drawing The Times’s obituary page, including the photograph on the page, depicting Camila Batmanghelidjh. It was the first time I had drawn someone I had known professionally as a journalist. Camila meant a lot to me, ever since I interviewed her for the Financial Times long ago. The nature of her work with seriously troubled children deeply affected me. Over six months, I’d followed her into many places, including one visit to a girl who had been admitted to an adult psychiatric ward despite being underage.
I don’t think I realised, when I drew that picture of Camila’s obituary, that it would mean so much. It was a kind of hinge: the journalist and the portrait-maker meeting for the first time on the same page.
I learned a lot, in the years between my interview with Camila and the drawing of her obit. Among other things, improvisational theatre had taught me that the person a journalist sees is very much a creation of the journalist. What the journalist sees is not objective reality. Journalists see what they’re looking for, just like artists.
We all have many versions of ourselves – and more than we can imagine, because most of those versions are to be found in the minds of the people around us, in a party you never leave.
Contain Multitudes is at Burgh House in Hampstead from 18 to 23 August 2026. The title comes from Walt Whitman: “I am large. I contain multitudes.” The show hangs about twenty of the office and home portraits, plus the Speccy grid, some self-portraits made in the years since coming home, and a couple of family pictures.
If you were one of the people Ayla asked me to draw at Hampstead Parish Church six years ago, this show is what happened next.
Go back to the main page: Contain Multitudes