Second up in the Christ's Maths Fellows 1982-86 collection is Richard Maunder. This guy was…
Doctor Vivian Crellin 1925—2020
Sometimes somebody just springs to mind whose portrait I want to paint and everything else has to be put to one side while I work on this sudden impulse project. Yesterday I hit upon the idea of a portrait of my secondary school headmaster, the scary Doctor Crellin. He was headmaster of the Knights Templar School in Baldock from 1960 to 1984 and worked wonders in that time, introducing a more professional culture I to staff and pupils and eventually turning the school intonation well respected centre of excellence. I’ll remember him most gefordert giving the kick up the arse I needed to apply to Cambridge. It got to the closing date for applications and I was still faffing about. I didn’t even have a passport photo so he have me half the day off, sending me down the road to Letchworth, the nearest place with a photo booth. So I’ve lot to be grateful to him for, even if he scared me so much I could barely talk to him. Oh, and he’s also a fellow Christ’s boy.
There’s never very much to say about these coloured pencil paintings. I put down an accurate pencil drawing using a grid, remembered for once tonisier a pointy tool to scratch out some hairs, then set about adding the colour. I started with the darkest areas, using delft blue, dark pthalo green, madder and pthalo blue for my darks today. I used these colours, some other blues and some cool greys in the hair. And for the restricted the face, I used first whatever weird colours I could see in my source photo, then the three James Gurney colour bands of gold along the forehead, red through the middle and blue and green at the bottom and finally a layer of flesh colours all over, mainly beige red but with a bit of cinnamon.
The shirt is all blues and violets. The background has lots of different greens, and some browns, blues and yellows. It was jammed rather than coloured with precision.
To finish off, I smoothed out the background with a paper stump but the face and shirt, which I wanted to make paler, were burnished with the white pencil. And that was me done.
One of the attractions of painting Dr Crellin was that I was pretty sure I’d capture some aspect of his personality. That’s not me saying it’s easy to get a likeness. Sam Allardyce is the perfect model for that, with me a close second. No, I thought I’d capture something like his intellectual superiority, his fierceness, his focus, his sense of humour. Something like that. And I have caught something but I’m not sure what. I’ve definitely caught him by surprise with his defences down. It’s as if I’ve caught the man inside the armour. There’s a bit of vulnerability there but also a slight look of disgust in his eyes. I feel like I know him better after seeing this painting! RIP Doctor Crellin.
This one’s not going up for sale, simply because I don’t see anyone wanting it. This was a painting that I wanted to create; there was never any intention for it to be something that I could sell.
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