WALKING INTO THE FOYER at the National Portrait Gallery, on my way to visit a Lucian Freud exhibition, I was surprised to find the walls covered in silhouettes. They were quite large – I guessed about life size – cut from a hard, shiny material, characterised by simple, flat bustlines beginning high on the chest.
JUNE 1996, exactly thirty years ago, was an important moment in my life. I finally found the courage to leave my weekend street-artist stall in Covent Garden, which had helped support my young family for so long, and embark on a full-time career as a silhouettist. What a crazy notion! What was I thinking?
THE FIRST QUESTION, whether from a wedding couple or a corporate event organiser, is usually “How much does it cost?” Pricing is obviously key, but for such a specialist arts entertainment it isn’t always easy to determine. So here’s an honest attempt to explain the factors which influence it.
I SPEND SO MUCH TIME writing and researching unknown and obscure silhouette artists that the question “who are the best known silhouette artists?” rather threw me. The art of the silhouette portrait is, on the one hand, ubiquitous. We see silhouettes everywhere, yet few people know much about the artists who made them.
MANY YEARS AGO I was looking through an old truck in the attic of my parent’s home in Somerset. My daughter, Taz (then quite a small child) had asked what was in it, so we opened the lid to take a look.
I’M TAKING A NEW DEPARTURE next week in taking a stand at the Parallax Art Fair. It takes place at the Old Town Hall, on the Kings Rd in Chelsea, on Saturday 28th February and Sunday 1st March.
EXACTLY 100 YEARS AGO, somewhere in England, an unknown silhouettist was cutting portraits and pasting them to an Xmas Greetings card. I know nothing about the artist and have never seen any other stylistically-similar silhouettes which I could attribute to them with any confidence.
WHEN PEOPLE ASK when silhouettes were most popular I usually answer “think Jane Austen”. It conjures up the right period! So it seems appropriate that this Xmas season, as we celebrate her 250th birthday (she was born on 16th December 1775), has been so dominated by her presence.
I’VE KNOWN ADAM STERNBERG for 30 years. As the owner of Sternberg Clark he was one of the first entertainment agencies to begin booking me for events in the 1990s. So I was very happy when he asked me to appear in the first series of his new podcast.
LEPORELLO IS CHARACTER in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. He keeps a long list of his master’s romantic conquests in a special, accordion-style, concertina book. His book is designed so the list can be unfurled at a moment’s notice to huge comic effect!
OVER THE YEARS I’ve collected most books which have ever been published on the subject of portrait silhouettes. Among them are a few I cannot read. One such is a slim volume published in German, in 1908, by the silhouettist Anna Corsep.
WHEN COLLECTING OLD SILHOUETTES, every so often I come across something which stops me in my tracks. “I wish I’d thought of that!” I say to myself. This is what happened when I first came across the lively, Munich-beer-drinkers silhouettes of Gebhard Wagner.
COLLECTING OLD SILHOUETTES can sometimes make me feel I’m in a late-night TV detective series. The tendency of street artists to never sign their own work has led me on many a wild-goose chase!
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I had the opportunity to travel in Switzerland, a place I’d only visited previously on fleeting one-day event bookings. I decided to record the trip with a silhouette diary.
WHEN LOOKING FOR examples of Parisian street silhouettes, the name Felily Odzikowski comes up again and again. However, all I know about him comes from the large number of his silhouettes I’ve collected over the years.
I’M NOT SURE WHY IT TOOK me so long to return to the theme of the Madonna and Child. The last time I created a card with this motif was in 1996. It was one of my first ever handmade Christmas cards! Since then it became an annual tradition.
