Interview
Ian Skidmore, best selling author, newspaper columnist and TV and Radio personality , has his portrait painted by Ishbel McWhirter.
Having your portrait painted is being interviewed in Technicolor. So when the Beaumaris artist Ishbel McWhirter sought to paint mine, I hovered between being flattered and being frightened. I have spent sixty-nine years constructing a caricature behind which to hide. Bit late now to break cover.
Nothing, however, succeeds like flattery. So I went to her superb glass-walled studio overlooking the Menai Straits at Glyn Garth. In less time than it took to tell my life story she painted not one, but four, two which I bought. Not out of conceit but because the portraits were such perceptive interviews I did not want them falling into the hands of strangers. Like the African tribesmen who will not he photographed because they fear the camera will capture their soul.
The first surprise was how quickly McWhirter works. At the end of the two-hour sitting I was already there, trapped on the canvas, spinnaker belly and all. She was attracted to me, she said, because of the flowing silk handkerchief I wear in my top pocket. Not the noble brow, the classic profile. Clearly the lady has much to learn about flattery though nothing about painting.
She was taught by the best. She was the favourite pupil of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, a founder of the Expressionist movement and in postwar Europe a name as revered as Picasso and Matisse. Kokoschka's talent as a portrait painter was frightening. In his day he was said to have manipulated a psychological tin opener to prize out the recesses of the soul.
So well did he teach McWhirter that after his death in 1980 she was the only one of his pupils to be invited to exhibit in a retrospective of his work at the archive museum at his birthplace Pöchlarn, outside Vienna.
But I paint in the background too early. The outline first. McWhirter was born in Prestatyn in 1927 and Kokoschka was the second genius she met. Her first was the pioneering educationalist A.S. Neill who founded the controversial Summerhill School where she was educated. He thought so highly of her he used the portrait she painted of him as the cover for his autobiography.