Mick Hartley

Alongside the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the BP Portrait Award is the other reliably worthwhile annual show in London – and it's free. I've posted about it before.

This year, unlike earlier years, there's not much doubt about the winner - which may be a reflection of the poorer quality than usual of the show generally, I'm not sure, but whatever, it's a standout portrait. 

At first sight she seems to have a totally blank expressionless face, but of course she hasn't: no face is ever expressionless, though we often try to aim for that, to protect our privacy. Is she guarded? Well, yes, certainly. Troubled? I don't know. Maybe. 

This is how the artist, Craig Wylie, puts it: "On one level the viewer's intrusion into the sitter's emotional state is tacitly accepted, on another it is positively rebuffed." Well OK, I like that. 

It seems to me an essentially modern portrait, an urban portrait: the portrait of someone who's used to being looked at, as we all are, in the street, on the Tube, and who doesn't give much away. In that sense it's not a character portrait: we couldn't claim any insight into her personality, as we might find in the great portraits of, say, Velasquez or Rembrandt. And yet… With a portrait, we're pre-programmed, as it were, to read the signals. It's the most extraordinary, human, part of our visual system. We can stare at others faces for hours. There's always some subtlety, some clues. But then, she doesn't want her feelings to be exposed. She's agreed to be painted by her boyfriend, so here she is, but beyond that, well…let's respect her privacy.

Beyond the accuracy, or skill, or psychological acuity or whatever, I don't think we should forget the sheer beauty of a picture like this. There's something essentially positive about good portraits. For a start, there's the sheer pleasure of seeing a good picture that depicts something beyond itself. Walking round the gallery I was thinking, yes, if I'd painted this one, or this one (most of them, really) I would be so happy. The joy of creation, and the satisfaction of capturing something through a skill – it's special. It's something to celebrate. (Cue: and yet, nowadays… no, I don't think I'll go there.)

And there's always the photographic comparison in the back of one's mind to add a bit of spice. Commonly the portraitist will emphasise the painterly side of their art, making, as it were, a virtue out of the fact that for many the whole art of portraiture seems something of an anachronism now that any idiot can point a camera at a subject and get a likeness. The deliberate brush strokes underline their point that no, there's no competition, not at all – look, can photographs do this? But in the more realistic portraits, like this one, the question's always there: could the artist have got the same effect from a photograph? Was there a moment here when the light was perfect and she looked exactly like this, and the artist could have saved himself all that effort if he'd snapped her just at that instant? Or taken a series of hundreds of photos, and selected the one that best captured what he was after – or perhaps did some crafty editing and mixing? I 'm sure the answer's no, but I couldn't exactly say why. In lieu of that explanation, we use the familiar shorthand and say, well, that's genius – that's what a great portrait does.