BP Portrait Winner

The person who painted this, a woman named Suzanne du Toit, which is a great name, just won Thirty Thousand Pounds Sterling in the BP portrait painting contest.  It's a portrait of her 35-year old son, Pieter.

Born in South Africa.  Currently residing in England.  Website is here.  Good for her ...

Not to quibble, but one wonders how many ducks they could be cleaning with that money.  Although that's not really fair -- too simplistic a take on life in the world today.  And besides, I like the painting.

The BP Portrait contest is held every year in conjunction with the (British) National Portrait Gallery.  The winner gets 30-Large.  Second place gets 10K.  Etc.  I heard about the call for entries last year about a week after the deadline had passed.  I thought it might have been appropriate to submit this ...

Portrait of then-BP Head Tony Hayward, painted about two months after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

My favorite part is the logo ...

Which you could describe as me at the absolute zenith of my powers.  But really, the whole thing is magnificent.  I love the nose too.

I'm reminded of Kiera Knightly as Elizabeth Bennet the first time she sees Pemberley.  Her mouth agape (realizing, at that point, that she'd just turned down Mr. Darcy, and everything that came with him -- including a house that made Downton Abbey look like a potting shed), she just stands there, dumbfounded, until somebody says "Elizabeth?  Are you all right?" and she responds "Yes.  I'm just taking in the magnificence of the thing."

I'm sure I didn't get those lines even close to right, but still, the magnificence of this particular painting is considerable.

Somebody asked me the other day where I'd have my LaPierre painting annotated and we got into a long discussion of Times Square vs. the Stock Exchange.  Virtually every one of my annotated paintings have stood in front of the NYSE; only Big Tony made it to Times Square.