Mall Gallery: The Royal institute of Oil painters Annual Exhibition

I love going to the exhibitions in the Mall Gallery because it’s one of the relatively few places where you can see great exhibitions of living artists. The most striking painting for me was the Tim Benson portrait of Eneless, a Cataract patient in Zambia. Oil on canvas, 48” x 36”

I love the looseness of his work and how he achieves the expressions and feelings of his sitters with very broad-brush strokes.

I attended a Tim Benson life portrait workshop at the Mall Gallery where he commented on his series of portraits of Ebola patient in Sierra Leone and explained how he uses a very limited palette and a limited collection of big brushes, to avoid the temptation to go into detail - something that I would like to learn, as at the moment I struggle to achieve likeness and expressions if I don’t go into detail. At the time my knowledge of oils was almost zero but I managed to do two portrait in his style.

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