Catherine Goodman: Portraits From Life

Striking new larger-than-life-sized portraits by the painter Catherine Goodman. Film director Stephen Frears, poet and broadcaster Daisy Goodwin, novelist Vikram Seth, Princes Drawing School student and ex-soldier Harry Parker and lawyer Diana Rawstron are among the subjects.

Goodman has been working on the paintings and drawings, which will be seen for the first time, over the past three years. All sittings took place at the artist’s London studio where all her subjects sat in a duck-egg blue chair which can be clearly seen as a unifying element in the portraits. Catherine inherited the chair from Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, which was the home of her great-grandmother, the Bloomsbury group socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Goodman’s paintings are psychological as much as painterly, and it is her interest in the fragility of life that guides her choice of subjects for this exhibition. Instead of turning away from human vulnerability, Goodman compulsively examines it, a response that may stem from her relationship with a disabled sister whom she has drawn and painted regularly for over twenty-five years. In a fast world, she is an artist prepared to wait for the truth to surface: making slow portraits that, little by little, scratch beneath the surface to unveil what is ordinarily hidden behind a public face.

This is the first display of Catherine Goodman’s work at the National Portrait Gallery, whose relationship with the artist dates back to 2002 when she was awarded first prize in the BP Portrait Award for her painting of Dom Antony Sutch, master of Downside College.