About the artist

Born in 1952, Michael grew up on the south coast of England, attending Worthing High School for Boys before completing a foundation course at West Sussex College of Art and Design, having already largely taught himself to paint in oils at home. He went on to Goldsmiths School of Art, obtaining a BA Hons in Fine Art in 1973.

On leaving Goldsmiths, Michael soon realised that it was going to be a choice between driving a London bus or painting, so after a day on the buses, he took the painting option, living frugally and supporting himself by working evenings at the Cutty Sark riverside pub in Greenwich.

After a year he had completed two pictures, submitting them to the1974 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Both were accepted and sold at the private view, receiving some good press. A resulting commission to paint a portrait of former Lord Mayor of London Sir Robert Bellinger meant that Michael now felt in a position to give up the pub job to concentrate on painting, which he has continued to do more or less without a break until the present.

In 1974 Michael married Caroline, a calligrapher and heraldic painter who he had met at foundation college. Living in London was proving to be very expensive, so being mindful of the need to keep expenses as low as possible they used their remaining savings to buy a small terraced cottage for £2,250 near Haworth in Yorkshire. It had no bathroom or hot water and the toilet was over the road and down a bit, but it was home. At this time Michael was continuing to show most years at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and was now connected to a dealer in Florence who was taking everything he could paint, paid for in advance.

Their daughter Ellen was born there in 1976. Michael recalls, “We all got cold and damp in the Yorkshire fog together for another couple of years before migrating south to an equally basic converted chapel in rural Dorset. It was an interesting place, terraced, with a total immersion font under the floor, ancient wiring that flashed and crackled as you walked about, and with a little crumbling cottage attached.”

While they were restoring the chapel, Michael continued to show at the RA and undertook several portrait commissions, and their son Richard was born in 1980. After a year or two he began to feel that he was painting himself into a corner, frustrated by the need to produce work he no longer felt driven to make. Temperamentally unsuited to painting to order, he began on a series of large freely worked figure paintings that although creatively fulfilling, proved difficult to sell, and brought about the end of his arrangement with the Florence Art Gallery.

During a visit to the National Portrait Gallery’s John Player Award in 1980, Michael immediately recognized in it something he might work towards. At that time, figurative art was very much overlooked by the art establishment, meaning that many figurative painters felt they were working in a cultural desert. His entry the following year reached the finals with the next being shortlisted. During this period painting sales were few, so it was only Caroline securing the contract to inscribe and illuminate the Bournemouth Crematorium Books of Remembrance that kept them afloat. In order to give her time to catch up with a backlog on the books, Michael elected to stop painting entirely for 18 months to look after the children and domestic arrangements, after which he resumed painting part time while continuing to share the domestic duties.

In 1983, one of his new ‘difficult’ paintings, Caroline Watching Television, won the John Player Award. This came with a substantial cash prize and a commission to paint a well-known person for the Gallery’s permanent collection. As a subject, Michael chose classical guitarist Julian Bream. He had immediately thought of Julian, whom he had long admired for his uncompromising intensity and his risky all-or-nothing approach to playing. Michael describes how the series of master classes Bream had made for the BBC in the 1970s were nothing short of inspirational; “they changed my approach to my own work forever. Although I had always taken on portrait commissions, this was an opportunity to take it to the next level. The prize money was very welcome, and the other portrait commissions that followed, including the Rev Eric Heaton for Christchurch Hall, Oxford, and Professor Charles Brink for Robinson College, Cambridge meant that Caroline’s was no longer the only income, so between us we got by.”

1983 also saw his first one-man show at the Morley Gallery in London. A mixture of new and borrowed back works meant it amounted to a resume of the previous ten years’ work, with the show subsequently touring, first to the Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight, and then to his home town at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery.

With young children and half the village coming in and out of the front door, working in the open chapel space was becoming a challenge. So, in 1987 the family moved deeper into the Dorset countryside to Child Okeford, a village under the imposing Iron Age ramparts of Hambledon Hill. The new home was a Georgian beerhouse with an attic studio, a large garden and cellars. It turned out to be just as crumbly as the Yorkshire cottage and the chapel, only bigger. “We thought we’d just move in and live there, but although it was a wonderful old place it turned out to have all kinds of rot and to be another huge rewiring and restoration job so doing it all ourselves became an ongoing project that we never really got on top of in the 35 years we were there”.

The new studio, with its steep stairwell, warped old elm floorboards, flaky walls and low beamed ceiling began to stimulate a new approach. Michael recalls “At first I found it difficult to make sense of this new space, but, with familiarity, it slowly evolved into a kind of personal language, one that after a time I could freely manipulate both objectively and metaphorically. At some point it began to acquire for me an independent significance, and thus a context for my own creative life”.

The first work completed in the new studio, Self Portrait with Wheelchair, won the inaugural Millfield Open in 1989, and the following year was awarded third prize in the Hunting Group Prizes.

Following a showing at a mixed summer exhibition at Beaux Arts in Bath in 1991, directors Reg and Patricia Singh offered him a one-man show scheduled for 1993. Shortly before the exhibition date, they acquired an additional gallery space in London’s Cork Street, so the show finally opened there.

The exhibition was a success, leading to another in 1997. Michael remembers “Working slowly inevitably meant I struggled to produce sufficient work, so a commission for a portrait of crime fiction writer Baroness P D James for the National Portrait Gallery was poor timing. Fortunately the NPG agreed to lend the portrait for the show as a condition of accepting the commission, while Chief Curator, Robin Gibson generously offered to write the catalogue notes”

Feeling once more the need to develop, Michael now embarked on a liberating series of large paintings of single heads, removing all narrative and background. As Beaux Arts didn’t feel they could take them, he decided to show them at his home during the 2002 biennial Dorset Art Weeks (DAW) open studio event. This proved surprisingly successful with most of the work finding buyers. As there was no gallery commission, it turned out to be quite a lucrative exercise, and was sufficiently successful that he was encouraged to repeat it two years later in 2004

As part of this alternative survival strategy, Michael had also put himself forward for several awards, winning the Holburne Portrait Prize in 2002, which led to a commission to paint jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard for the museum. He had also been elected to membership of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (RP) in 2001, at whose annual exhibition his portrait of composer Sir John Tavener (which had previously been purchased by the National Portrait Gallery) was awarded the RP’s Changing Faces Prize.

During his second DAW show, Michael had a visit from Jamie Anderson of Waterhouse and Dodd (W&D), another Cork Street gallery, who offered him a one-man show for 2006. The exhibition proved to be a sell-out, with work going to some good collections, including three to the ill-fated Scheringa Museum of Realist Art in the Netherlands. Increasingly reliable sales, combined with portrait work, enabled Caroline to retire from the crematorium job, leading to a settled and productive period in the attic studio where work continued for a second show at Waterhouse and Dodd in 2010, who were also showing work at art fairs and mixed exhibitions in the UK and internationally. There was some portrait work too, including a commission from the House of Lords to paint the then Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer.

In 2012, Michael was approached by film director Wes Anderson to create a fictional Renaissance ‘masterpiece’ for his forthcoming film The Grand Budapest Hotel, whose plot revolved around the theft of a priceless painting, Boy with Apple. Unaccustomed to film work, Michael (as Johannes Van Hoytl the younger) went through all kinds of agonies in its creation. However, in the end, the film was a great success being nominated for 10 BAFTAs and 9 Oscars (winning five) generating considerable press coverage for Michael and for the painting.

With their parents becoming increasingly frail, it was difficult to predict when settled periods of work would be possible so Michael decided to restrict himself, for a while, to a series of still-lifes. Often depicting dysfunctional, abandoned or disarticulated objects these works were featured in a one-man exhibition in 2015 at W&D’s new Albemarle Street gallery.

On the death of his father in 2011 Michael recalls that “Returning from his funeral, I felt very strongly the changes brought on by his passing. I wanted to reflect on the new territory I found myself in, territory he had vacated and that I was inevitably to come to inhabit myself’. The resulting drawing Self Portrait in memory of my Father was subsequently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.”

By 2017 Michael was beginning to feel that he had exhausted the creative possibilities of the Child Okeford studio. Both he and Caroline were feeling the burden of maintaining the old family home, so they moved to the county town of Dorchester, to a smaller Victorian house with a studio overlooking Fordington Green.

The 2020 pandemic had meant that an exhibition at Waterhouse and Dodd’s Saville Row space had been forced to close early. The unavailability of sitters had also necessarily meant a return to still-life subjects, a solitary pursuit that was proving to have an increasing appeal anyway. Michael explains, “I feel still-life has poetry at its heart. While not ruling out future figure paintings, as I grow older I find myself increasingly attracted to the contemplative or meditative qualities still life has to offer. To spend weeks, sometimes months, in solitary communion with one or two seemingly insignificant, often neglected objects, treating their depiction with great care and respect strikes me as an entirely fitting way to spend my remaining years’

Michael is now represented by the Portland Gallery in London’s St James’s and is looking forward to working with them there in the future.