Toby Wiggins - the truthful eye

Above: Portrait of Simon Grant-Jones

Above: Portrait painter - Toby Wiggins

Above: David Vincent, pedigree cattle breeder, Wimborne

Above: Jim Bennett, retired Dorset huntsman

Above: Tony Cottrell, thatcher, Wimborne

Above: Jim Bettle, charcoal burner

‘This studio is a lovely place to work,’ says Toby Wiggins as he puts another log on the fire that’s blazing merrily in the ancient cast-iron stove. ‘It was built by George Spencer Watson, the portrait painter. He bought Dunshay Manor in 1921. His daughter Mary, who was a very talented sculptor, an RA in fact, worked here. She died in 2006. I can see her now, working on a piece of her beloved Purbeck stone. There’s a great atmosphere here.  The manor house is so lovely, working here is a joy, I have to pinch myself sometimes, and as for the studio, it has great presence and just to know that two talented artists have worked here in the past somehow inspires you.’


Painter’s paraphernalia...

Looking about me I can see what he means. It’s just how you imagine an artist’s studio should be. There’s a half-finished portrait on an easel, a striking image that, because it is bathed in the light flooding in from a huge north-facing window, seems to shine as if illuminated from within. All around are canvases, old and new, books, and bric-a-brac of various sorts. A bench is covered with the paraphernalia of a painter’s life. Hundreds of tubes of paint, some empty, some half empty, some full, are strewn over it. Dozens of brushes, a couple of mugs, a milk bottle, and a jar of coffee contend for space on it. It is covered in splodges of paint. It is a sort of installation by default.

 ‘I can almost see where I was born when I step outside from here,’ Toby tells me. ‘I have known this place since I was a child. I couldn’t see over the dry-stone walls when I first came here!’

Thirty-five-year-old Toby attended the Falmouth School of Art from 1991 to 1994 where he gained a BA in Fine Art. From Falmouth he went to the Royal Academy Schools in London where he did post-graduate study in painting and drawing. Along the way he gained several prestigious awards including the Royal Institute Prize for Drawing in 1996, the Royal Bank of Scotland Prize for Drawing in 1997 and the Royal Institute Prize for Painting in 1998. Post-college he gained the Prince of Wales Award for Portrait Drawing in 2005, the BP Travel Award and the Changing Faces Prize for Portraiture from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 2006, in which year he was also elected a member of that same Royal Society.

‘After Falmouth I didn’t know whether to become a painter or not so I worked on a sheep farm at Rempstone near Corfe for a year,’ says Toby. ‘I had worked at Afflington Farm near here as a teenager. The family lived in a rented cottage there. My dad was a furniture upholsterer and my mum was a veterinary nurse. We always had lots of animals so farm work sort of came naturally. I’ve done walling, shearing, hedgelaying, lambing, and, needless to say, shoveled a lot of shit.’


Part of a tradition...

I ask Toby about the BP Travel Award – an award which enabled him to spend three weeks driving around Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Devon making portraits of people who worked on the land. ‘I wanted to find people who were part of that tradition which over the last 10 years or so has almost disappeared. It is something I’ve wanted to do for years. I once read a book called Akenfield in which the author Ronald Blythe wrote about the farm workers of a small part of Suffolk. It inspired me. I found its paired down, austere language very moving. As for visual influences, I had the work of August Sander in my mind. He photographed agricultural labourers in Germany in the 20s, and then there are those images from the Dustbowl in America during the Depression.’

Toby travelled in a rented VW camper van, a mode of transport that at first had him fighting the gear stick but which proved ideal for negotiating the narrow lanes of rural Wessex. ‘The people I visited showed me great generosity. I often received gifts – apples, cider, mushrooms, meat. What they all had in common was a strong sense of place and a passion for their work.’ Of the 17 portraits that resulted, nine are drawings in charcoal or pencil, the remainder are in oils worked up from sketches and photographs.

Now look at his picture, an oil on gesso panel, of 84-year-old Jim Bennett, a retired Dorset huntsman. What strikes you is the steadfast gaze of the sitter. The old man has donned his huntsman’s uniform and taken up his whip to sit for his portrait. There is no visual rhetoric here, Toby has painted what he saw before him. ‘Jim wanted to put on his huntsman’s uniform so I let him,’ Toby tells me. ‘Normally I find all that setting up that some artists go in for rather contrived, silly even, but Jim wanted it that way.’

Look at the picture again. Jim has his everyday trousers on and slippers on his feet. The picture has taken on a poignancy, it seems to say this proud old man once thought nothing of getting on a horse and jumping hedges and ditches in pursuit of a fox but now all that has gone for ever. Now the picture is much more than a portrait of a retired huntsman, it is a picture about the sadness of growing old. Yet, there is not a trace of sentimentality in the picture. Like Blythe’s Akenfield it is all the more moving for dealing unflinchingly with raw facts – facts which have been put down on canvas without a hint of attitudinizing or contrivance.


Catching a likeness...

It is sometimes said that photography is much better at producing a likeness of a person than is painting. For Toby this is just not so. ‘The pace of a human being is not a hundredth of a second. That is just a blink,’ he tells me. ‘You don’t experience the world like that. The camera has only one eye, we have two. Space is different, we move around, our vision changes slightly. Both painter and subject are animated. Time goes by. The light changes. Sometimes I talk to the sitter, then there are periods of silence. For me, painting a portrait is not about capturing a moment.’

There is something else, too. In this increasingly digitised and media-dominated world, with its concentration on celebrity and surface glitz, there is a strong case for saying that images produced with the aid of modern technology are likely to have been doctored in some way, or to use the modern term, airbrushed. In the final analysis, to paint someone celebrates the uniqueness of that individual human being and the enigma of otherness, and because this is so, a portrait reminds us that we are all human and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, all deserving of respect. Only very gifted artists can do this. Toby Wiggins is such an artist.

To see more of Toby’s work, visit www.tobywiggins.co.uk