He painted my soul and my crooked tooth: sitting for Wilfrid Wood

“What do you know about Lyme disease?” was one of the first things Wilfrid Wood asked me while we waited for his workshop to begin. He was running a two-hour plasticine class at Acrylicize’s ‘Joy’ festival, where I was hosting the events and interviewing the practitioners. Despite how little I knew about Lyme disease, we ended up chatting at length, and then he said he’d like to paint my portrait.  

I’d first seen his work in 2021 at Peckham’s Copeland Park and then again the next year at Maddox Gallery where he exhibited a plasticine ABBA. He has a huge online following. I was thrilled to accept his invitation. And then I was nervous. Could my ego handle being painted by Wilfrid, whose portraits are – by his own admission – “extorted and exaggerated”? I’d seen those videos of couples having their caricatures done at the beach, and I knew you couldn’t pay me to sit for one. Either way, I thought, the experience would, at the very least, make a good article. 

What I was expecting was a few hours in total silence, a bit of internal debate about the puzzles of body image, and a nice chance to peek behind the curtain of how artists work. What I got was so much better. 

I arrived at Wilfrid’s Hackney townhouse on a Friday morning, I was eerily familiar with his home thanks to a viral “How much do you pay in rent? Do you mind if I have a look around?” video tour from years ago. Wilfrid says he is surprised by how well that video did; his expectations were so low that he didn’t even bother to pick up his socks from the floor. We settled on the kitchen as the best place to do the portrait. The walls are filled with artworks, several of Wilfrid himself done by other artists as part of an art-swap, others by artists of his parents’ generation, lots with cocks on. Hung in front of an antique mirror is a single oven mitt in the shape of a crocodile, like something from Punch and Judy. I love how close this art is to his All-Bran.

As we begin, he puts some music on. I ask whether the music is more for him or his sitter. He tells me that it is “entirely” for him, but that it “offers a little entertainment” for the people who find the periods of silence painful. I mention to him that I’ve been getting a bit of practice lately with the whole sitting-silently thing, because I’ve started going to Quaker meetings. He lights – he sings in a secular church choir – and we talk about our desire for the community of religious services, but without the religious part. The Quakers don’t do singing, I say, which is a shame because some hymns are absolute bangers. He tells me about times he’s been moved to tears by the music, and that once upon a time this crying would have been called “being touched by the holy spirit.” I tell him I must be being touched by the holy spirit every time a mother wins enough money on The Chase to take her kids to Centre Parcs. 

I think the playlist he’s put on must be a specifically spiritual-y one, as it rotates through hymn-like songs played on an organ, and monastic chanting. During one swelling hymn, as I look out through his open kitchen door to his garden, and see a butterfly land on a towering buddleia in the sunlight, I think about how divine it is to be perceived. Then the spiritual clarity is burst: “It’s Britney bitch!”. He’s just been playing his Spotify likes on shuffle. 

We have a break after the first hour or so, and share a flat nectarine which he bought the day before and is thrilled about. I ask whether people always want to see how the painting is progressing during these breaks. “They want to, but they can’t,” he says quickly, anticipating that I probably asked because I wanted to have a look. “They’ll want to change something.” 

It’s no wonder that some people who sit for Wilfrid (even those who have paid for the privilege) are a little on edge. After all, Wilfrid’s entry to a charity auction was once rejected after the organisers deemed his seven-inch 3D portrait of Sir Paul McCartney – with Macca’s ageing (practically lipless) bonce swelling to fill the entire vinyl sleeve – too unflattering. He doesn’t like to call his work caricatures, even though he admits they do have caricaturistic elements – “but all portraits do.”

 

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“Caricature seems like the lowest form of art, if sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” he says, adding that bad caricatures are predictable and boring, and give “sticking out ears to people who don’t even have them.” Maybe that’s why I feel so bad for the people who are filmed receiving a drawing of their partner trapped inside their huge inflated breasts, when they’re only a C cup.

He has had a different sitter in every day for the last two weeks, all done in oil paint on his mother’s easel. He uses some of her paints, too, some of them 70 years old. Oil paint is relatively new for him, but then again, his whole fine art career is a pivot: he studied graphic design for the promised job security, though he says he’d “always wanted to be an artist in my heart.” 

This new medium clearly comes with some ghosts, and a faultline of surprising self-criticalness and comparison emerges over the course of our four-hour session. At first, he casually mentions that the portrait is starting to look a little “Bloomsburyish”, because of the domestic setting and my patterned dress. Later, the spectres of other artists become more oppressive, “I’ve suddenly become very aware of David Hockney,” he says. “It’s like a curse that comes over me.” Hockney has been a life-long inspiration for Wilfrid, despite his grandparents’ wariness of the artist because he was gay. As we talk about his new venture in oils, he says dejectedly, “I’m still thinking, what would a proper oil painter think of this?” I probe him on this self-doubt. “It’s the classic medium; hundreds of thousands of artists have done brilliantly before. What on earth could I bring to it?” I came to this sitting believing that I would be the one put in the hotseat of vulnerability by being looked at, but Wilfrid has allowed me into his world, and this emotional nakedness is a two-way street.

I ask him whether these portrait sessions are intense for him. “Sometimes I feel like I can hardly handle it.” He gets migraines that cause visual disturbances, and he worries that they could interfere with the process. But beyond these physical barriers, it’s the emotional toll of the process that is probably the most taxing. He has painted over a dozen people this week alone, and the sense of responsibility can be overwhelming. He has to meet his sitters where they are: chatty, cold, demanding, frightened; and bend himself to what they need. He tells me about one sitter who burst into tears during their session because she was going through a divorce, or others who never told him their names because they had met on Grindr and really only came because they wanted to fuck. The combination of artist and sitter can be artistically liberating or emotionally disastrous, or both, with the added risk that he might “find them annoying or fall in love with them”. “I need to be whatever they need and do a painting”. 

Despite the emotional intensity, painting every day helps him to get into the swing of things, and he’s adopted a kind of radical acceptance when it comes to the sitter’s reaction to the final result. “I slightly wash my hands of it… I’ve done the absolute best I can,” he explains. He has made all of his “individual marks” but what they add up to is “slightly beyond me”. He compares it to when John Lennon said that he didn’t write Across the World, he dreamed it. It turns out it was actually Paul McCartney who said it about Yesterday. It’s like that quote from Michelangelo (although how accurate are quotes from blokes 500 years ago?) that all of his sculptures were already inside the stone, and his job was to remove the excess material to reveal them to the world. Wilfrid viewing the final portrait as both above him and pre-destined is helpful for “demoting your ego”, he tells me. 

 

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Every now and again, Wilfrid thanks me for my patience while I’m sitting, but I don’t feel like I’ve been patient at all. I’ve been having a wonderful time. Moments of stillness and silence never felt claustrophobic, and it was never long before we would begin to chat about something that fell in the emboldening area between small talk and intimacy. After our first break and for the rest of our session, I realised that I had almost entirely forgotten that there would be a portrait of me at the end of this. I sort of didn’t want to see it – not from my initial fears of a bruised ego, but because it didn’t really feel like it mattered. 

Wilfrid announces that the portrait is done. I don’t know whether he is going to turn it around and show me – like a hairdresser bringing you a mirror at the end of your cut – or whether I should stand up and take a look. I feel nervous. It’s like having someone watch you open the birthday present they’ve just given you – I want to react in the right way, especially because of how much I like Wilfrid now.

Put it this way, if the painting were a photograph, I probably wouldn’t post it on Instagram. My mouth is slightly open, revealing what I suspect is my tooth at the front which crosses over because I stopped wearing my retainer as a teenager. I love it. I’m immediately drawn to the hand I had draped over the kitchen table, so I could discretely make notes on my pad, which has a satisfying shape, a bit like a squid. I love the blues Wilfrid had swept into my skin – although they are probably an indication that I should sleep more and get more sunlight – and I am oddly proud that I’ve inspired some interesting colour combinations. It’s hard to get how much I like it across to Wilfrid without feeling like I’m overreacting. It wasn’t just undeniably me (if this were a facial composite for a crime: I dunnit); it felt aligned to my soul, certainly having captured the energy of the time we’d just spent together.

Wilfrid goes upstairs to take its photo in better light while I pack up my things. I soon hear him running downstairs, saying there’s something he needs to fix because it is “driving him crazy.” He stands in the kitchen, barefoot, holding the piece in one hand as he makes changes to the neck with the other. There’s a real tenderness in how he holds the piece, and I’m pleased that this portrait seems to matter to him.

Days later, I’m wondering what I’ve learned. The article is going to need an ending. And it hits me: even though I thought I’d put my ego aside – because by the end of the session, I didn’t really care how I ended up looking in the portrait – I just placed that self-obsessedness somewhere else. I left wanting that to have been Wilfrid’s favourite sitting of the week, for it to have been as life-affirming for him as it had been for me. I wanted him to have enjoyed our musings about religion and relationships as much as I did. Perhaps being a sitter for a portrait is inherently self-centred, no matter where we place our need for recognition.

I’ve learned nothing, except that I probably should have carried on wearing my retainers. And that you can get Lyme disease in the UK.