I’m looking at two portraits of Anthony Scaramucci. In one, the former White House director of communications could be president. Sharp facial features, bold colours, straight shoulders on his suit jacket. The other, with its baggy eyes, muted tones and slouch, might as well be a courtroom sketch. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
The real Scaramucci fidgets in a chair against a yellow backdrop, suited, booted and tanned, as a small crowd looks on. The Mooch, who gained fame for a 10-day stint as Donald Trump’s spinner-in-chief almost a decade ago, is now having his image decided for him as he sits in the fancy but faded hall of the Battersea Arts Centre.
Now in its 13th series, Portrait Artist of the Year has become a TV institution. In the room, you can walk around the circular stage, each slice revealing a new celebrity, the modern tech and old glamour lending the feel of a wartime command centre. Over four hours, three painters per star try their hand at creating a portrait. Host Stephen Mangan tells me celebrities come up to him at parties and ask to be given a shot in the hotseat. Today, Louis Theroux and Joanna Scanlan are alongside Scaramucci. After Mangan calls time, each celebrity has to choose a winner from their three portraits. Scaramucci picks the presidential one.
Theroux, it seems, has been using his quiet time in the chair to ponder the dynamics of the room, applying his keen eye for weirdness to unearth a three-way tension. He can see the audience, who can see the art and the artist, who can see him, but they know he can’t see the art. “There’s this almost sense that the loop is not quite closed, and they know that at some point I’m gonna see it, what the fuck is it gonna look like?”
He’s picked something up in the winning portrait, too. “She captured a kind of inner anxiety that I think most of the time I manage to disguise quite well,” he says. “There was a sense of angst, uncertainty that she saw in me that I think was accurate, true to life.”
What, I ask, is the biggest portrait of himself he’d be happy to hang in his own house? Theroux doesn’t get to call the shots, he insists. If it was up to him, though, it would probably be the size of two open Big Issues. For a while, his wife put up a poster-sized photograph of him aged 14 or 15 windsurfing. “I didn’t have a problem with it being up, but I did think it was an interesting choice,” he says. “That was obviously an incarnation of me that she was happy to have. I think me windsurfing now would be a different story.”
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Usually, Theroux is the one interrogating reality, offering up a portrayal of people. This time the dynamic is flipped. He doesn’t see his documentaries as portraits, exactly, but there are parallels.
“All creative endeavours are about choices, and as much about what you leave out as what you put in,” he says.
“There’s a sense that you have a limited time with someone in order to tell the truth about them.”
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Generative AI means anybody can log on and create, say, a portrait of Theroux in the style of Monet, Van Gogh, or Picasso. For modern artists, there is concern that their work will be used to train AI models. Gallery owners are split on how widespread it will become, and, while just one in seven artists describe themselves as “enthusiastic adopters”, only three in 10 are “entirely opposed”. Misgivings from creators are perhaps offset by clear demand from consumers, with no shortage of predictions for the AI art market to soar into the billions.
Does Theroux judge people who like AI art? “I try not to judge people in general. I think AI art can be interesting,” he says, mentioning Beeple, the American artist who has experimented with AI in the creative process. He is fond of what he sees on his Instagram feed, “as long as you’re doing it in a way that feels creative and interesting”. But he still likes the “lumps and splotches” of having something on the wall.
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New judge Jonathan Yeo, famous for his extremely red portrait of King Charles, is looking for paintings that capture something a photograph can’t, that tell a story with layers. “You want to feel that this personality might be about to get up off the canvas and come out and talk,” he says. Humans are good at this. While filmmaking and animation are under profound threat from AI, perhaps the art of the portrait might hold fast. “We are so finely attuned as humans to micro-expressions, the slightest crease in a mouth, or eyes implying they’re about to smile, or frown, because it’s part of our survival instinct. But we’re a long way away from AI being anywhere near as sensitive,” Yeo says.
Louis Theroux by Greg Barradale
Watching the creative act unfold, with no guarantee of – or desire for – perfection, it’s the human side which keeps Mangan coming back as host. An artist and a portrait might fall flat. Or they might prompt a reaction like Scanlan’s, who cried when she saw her grandmother in one of the depictions of her own face.
“This show is so popular because we all respond to art in some way. Art is often seen as kind of elitist, only the real people in the know can really appreciate it. And of course that’s bullshit,” says Mangan. It begins, perhaps, with kids’ portraits on household walls: “No-one’s pretending they’re great works, but they mean something because it’s a bit of creativity. That’s magic, and something that’s still unique to human beings.”
Scaramucci’s childhood home didn’t have any paintings – just family photos and pictures of the Pope. I don’t think he likes it when I suggest the portrait he chose looks like he could be president. “I didn’t get those vibes. But OK – I don’t see myself as president,” he says. It does, he admits, look like the one where he has the most Botox. “Of course I have some. How old are you?” he asks. 30. “I’m 62, do you think I don’t have any Botox?”
The psychology of sitting still
Anthony Scaramucci by Greg Barradale
Sitting still, doing nothing for four hours has been a novelty. Scaramucci can’t remember the last time he did it. He’s been thinking about a couple of things to improve his business and personal life. Despite feeling like he was on display at London Zoo, he found it relaxing. “It was almost like a wake-up call for me in some ways, you know, I have to get myself back to being more contemplative and less reactionary to everything,” he says.
During his ill-fated tenure in the White House, Scaramucci was the one trying to set the narrative. As he sits in the seat today, it’s others putting a narrative onto him. And he’s comfortable with it – in part, he says, because “the failure at the White House made me more psychologically minded”. He adds: “If I’m being brutally honest, I’ve had an interesting life. Ups and downs. I’ve been humbled by the stock market, I’ve been humbled by politics, and I’ve been humbled by the tribulations of life.
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“When that happens, you can get to a period of self-reflection, and hopefully more self-awareness. The less flattering pictures would have probably been offensive to me at a younger, more immature part of my life. Today I want to take them home and put them in frames.”
A delay in filming has given me a chance to try my hand at drawing each of the sitters. Begin with the chair, I reckon. But as you think you’re about to capture the Theroux jaw, or the Scaramucci quiff, they twitch, the angles change. Perhaps this is why many of the artists are working from photos.
I show Scaramucci my effort. He whips his phone out and takes a picture. When I show Theroux my pen portrait of him, he is puzzled. “You did your best,” he says.
Portrait Artist Of The Year (S13) airs weekly on Sky Arts and streaming service NOW from 7 October
