Wearside care home residents feature in striking virtual lockdown exhibition

Strikingly life-like portraits feature in the exhibition by leading artist Andrew Tift, which was due to be staged at Arts Centre Washington.

But with the culture venue closed due to the pandemic, the exhibition is being staged online so people can still marvel at Andrew’s intricate works, which features the faces of care home residents from Washington.

A renowned portrait artist famous for his paintings of leading politicians, Andrew was commissioned for a project prior to lockdown during which he worked in three Washington residential homes, Washington Manor Care Home, Washington Lodge Care Home and St George’s Residential Care Home, to produce drawings of local pensioners.

The resulting portraits formed an important and popular part of a wider exhibition at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci last year.

The remarkably-detailed pencil portraits, which were supposed to be displayed in the main gallery of Arts Centre Washington last month, now form part of an online exhibition.

Andrew said: “It’s interesting doing an online exhibition but it is always going to be a ‘Plan B’ option. I’d love to show the work one day in Washington, with some new paintings to accompany the show.

“The project is ongoing in a sense, I intend to make some ‘larger than life scale’ - colour paintings of some of the residents. It was a privilege to meet them and I got lots of rich and textured material which is still to be developed.

“Arts Centre Washington is the perfect venue to place the work back into the community which inspired it. I loved doing the project and I think it is one of my strongest bodies of work in nearly 30 years of practice. I’m so pleased that it came off - with huge help from the gallery staff.”

Andrew says the exhibition has become all the more relevant in light of the devastating effect that Covid-19 has had on care homes.

He said: “I don’t see it purely as an indigenous body of work which can only be consumed in the North East. I think people anywhere would respond to the fragility of their lives and it has become even more relevant and prescient recently with the wave of devastation that has hit care homes across the world, with the onset of Covid 19.

“I wanted to interpret the residents very much as individuals and depict them in the most intimate and sensitive way that I could. Texture of skin, bone structure, expression, mood, scars, hands, hair, eyes, clothes depicted in microscopic detail as I tried to unravel that person’s identity and experience which is so ingrained within their face.”

The One Day You’ll Be Older Too project was funded by Washington Area Committee, which provides local residents with a greater say in council affairs, through its strategic initiative budget.

Sunderland City Council’s Cabinet Member for Communities and Culture, Councillor John Kelly, said: “It was fantastic to see one of the country’s most respected portrait artists working with people in Washington and his portraits were a huge part of last year’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing exhibition.

“Hopefully the portraits will be shown in Washington in the not-too-distant future and in the meantime I’d urge people to see them online, they really are quite remarkable.”

Andrew is one of the country’s best-known artists, making his name through portraits of Tony Benn, Neil and Glenys Kinnock, and Ken Livingstone, whose portrait had been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery since 2014. He was also commissioned by the House of Lords to paint a portrait of Lord Peter Carrington.

The portraits have been added to the Museum’s own collection and can be seen at https://sunderlandculture.org.uk

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