Richard Madeley was dreadful model on TV

THREE artists from the same life drawing group are exhibiting at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley.

Mick McNicholas, Katie Gall and Nerissa Deeks were all featured in the last series of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year and will be recreating the experience of painting a sitter in a demonstration at the museum tomorrow (Saturday).

Mick, a Liverpudlian who lives in Wokingham, has been a professional artist for about 12 years and started the Wokingham Life Drawing Society about 10 years ago.

The 62-year-old says: “After school, the plan was to go to art school and I did a foundation course but I packed it in because of the band I was in and then I regretted it years later.

“I started off analogue and then I was a musician and then went to study digital media.

“I got back into it about 14 years ago and about 12 years ago I decided to give it a go to become a professional artist.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of sitting at a computer and I want to give it a go before it’s too late’.

“Nerissa and Katie are regulars at my life drawing nights. Five of us applied to Sky and three of us got in.

“When we found out, I said, ‘Whatever happens, let’s have an exhibition at the end of it’, so we had one in Walton-on-Thames just before Christmas.

“We did a couple of days there where we tried to recreate the Sky Arts portrait event and we’re going to be doing that again at the museum. There seemed to be a lot of interest in people watching us paint.”

The three artists all paint with oils. Mick says: “Katie and Nerissa use mainly tiles, painting little brush strokes of colour, while I think more about values, how light and dark something is, and bring the colour out afterwards.

“We all tried to paint from life on the show. Nerissa was first — her episode was filmed a week before mine and her model was Richard Madeley and I went along to watch her.

“He was awful as he just didn’t care about keeping still or didn’t seem to anyway because he didn’t even try.

“My model was a Senegalese musician, Baaba Maal, who kept falling asleep.

“He’d travelled in from Australia that morning and after lunch he just kept nodding off. You know that thing where you nod off and then you jolt awake? It was like that
constantly.

“Katie was prepared as she’d had the horror stories from me and Nerissa. She had Self Esteem [a singer originally called Rebecca Taylor].

“The models get to choose at the end of the sitting which painting they’d like to keep and Self Esteem chose Katie’s and Katie also made the top three at the end of the
programme.”

Katie, from Crowthorne, says: “I’ve been a big fan of the show. I do a lot of portrait painting and it’s free to enter, so it was good fun but it’s quite a full-on day.

“I painted Self Esteem in the first round. She was good as she held quite still and she gave it a very good attitude. She’s an actress as well, which I think maybe helped. The problem is you’ve got cameras coming in front of you constantly and you’re also a very long way away from the model who often moves quite a lot.

“We’re used to painting professional models but obviously these were celebrities, so they’re constantly doing interviews and getting distracted.”

Katie, who works in IT and is married with two children, aged eight and four, begins with a freehand drawing.

“In terms of tiling it’s the way I apply colour,” she says. “You look at a face and maybe you see there’s a shape on the cheek in a perhaps kind of pinky colour. You try to make that colour and then just paint it on the canvas.

“You’re used to painting in normal conditions, so painting someone with a full face of make-up under studio lights is a bit of a challenge.”

Nerissa says Madeley was a “dreadful” model.

She laughs: “He didn’t really understand the concept of sitting for a portrait, I don’t think. I didn’t finish the painting properly on the day, I finished it subsequently.

“My revenge was that I ‘pinned’ his trouser legs together.

“I was really surprised when I got the phone call saying, ‘You’re through’. I was not really expecting to get through but there you are, it was a nice surprise.”

Nerissa, who is married with two grown-up sons, recalled that when she was first chosen for the show she was told to keep it to herself, except for the people that she was allowed to invite.

“They don’t want you telling loads of people you’re going to be on until it’s fairly close to the show,” she said. “I think Katie told Mick fairly quickly that she was going to be on. I didn’t say anything for a while and then I said to Mick, ‘Oh, I’m on, do you want to come as a guest?’

“Then he told me that both he and Katie were on as well so it was really funny.”

Nerissa, who works for GUTS Fundraising, a bowel cancer charity based in Guildford, submitted a self-portrait which got her on to Portrait Artist of the Year.

“When I was on the show, [presenter] Stephen Mangan liked my self-portrait,” she says. “He’s a very nice guy.

“He wanted to buy it, so I said, ‘I’m very flattered that you want it. I work for a charity, so will you make a donation?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a cause close to my heart’.

“It turned out that his mother had died of bowel cancer at a very young age.

“Subsequently, he came and did an event for us, a lunch, so that worked out rather nicely and it raised a lot more money than just selling the painting would have done.”

The museum is hoping to line up a rower as a sitter for tomorrow’s demonstration, which will take place in the Thames Room from 11am to 1pm and 2pm to 4pm. People are welcome to join in by sketching as well and some materials will be provided.

• Portraits From Life, featuring artworks by Mick McNicholas, Katie Gall and Nerissa Deeks, is in the Community Gallery at the River & Rowing Museum until Sunday, March 2 (entry free with admission). There is free entry to the painting demonstration, with a discount admission price of £7 per adult to see the Portraits From Life exhibition. For more information, visit rrm.co.uk