Yeo has been meeting doctors to see if using a combination of 3-D scanning, sculpting in VR and 3-D printing could work to produce a very accurate brace for a patient to wear to correct the spinal curve.Ī family member is never far away on the days I sit for him and their portraits are generally hanging on the studio walls. One of his daughters has scoliosis and is just at the age when she will require potentially life-changing, but very risky, surgery. I could work from that for reference.”) Put another way: Yeo’s first experience of sculpting was in VR.īut Yeo’s interest in VR goes beyond art. He spent a year figuring out how Google’s Tilt Brush could be useful and discovered, “quite by chance”, that he could put a 3-D scan of his head into the virtual space with him. They’re too nice.”) And sometimes he sounds more mournful, as he didn’t have the chance to experiment with as many different media as he would have liked.īut he’s been making up for it ever since. (“They don’t teach you any technical skills there. Occasionally, he says he didn’t go to art school in a way that sounds almost boastful – look where he is without it. “I think Huddleston sat for me because he felt sorry for me,” he says. At the time, Yeo was recovering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Success, if not financial reward, came in his early twenties, after a cubist-style portrait of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid campaigner, and more commissions quickly followed. Yeo regularly mentions that he didn’t go to art school. It was a ‘wow’ experience for 30 seconds, but wore off after that.” I tried a more basic VR headset a year or two before. “I was amazed by how much further along the tech had got than I thought. “I was interested in how you could use this as a tool rather than a piece of paper.” Nonetheless, he was impressed. Messing around in VR is all well and good, but once you’ve removed the headset you forget all about it, which is the problem that Yeo had. You can construct abstract wavy scenes with a flick of the wrist or dance around to create large, gravity-defying sculptures that trace your movement through the virtual world. I experimented with Tilt Brush, Google’s VR answer to Microsoft Paint. Yeo was running late for our meeting, so I had a go (with his assistant Reuben’s request that I avoid running into furniture). How would he show him now? An EU badge on his lapel? “I’d maybe not make him look so purposeful.” But when anyone would come in the room they would sit up straight.” The resulting portrait is of a man on a mission. Cameron had his trainers on and feet up on the table, joking with George Osborne. When I visited him at work it was like a sixth-form common room. Maybe Brexit wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t. I didn’t feel duped by him, but he made a monumental fuck-up.”ĭavid Cameron was just a lowly leader of the opposition when Yeo painted him. People are much more complicated than that. I never bought that, partly because I was brought up around politics, I suppose. People are very vitriolic about him – they were taken in. Despite Blair’s mistake, or perhaps because of it, Yeo is complimentary about his sitter. With his second portrait of Tony Blair, the muted palette sets off a blood-red poppy on his lapel – a reference to his “foreign policy” as Yeo puts it. Some sitters, such as Jude Law, ask him not to make them look beautiful, as they want something that shows who they are, not how they make their living. Currently, Yeo is, if not the most powerful, then certainly the most well-regarded portrait artist in the world, having already had several retrospectives, including the one at the National Portrait Gallery.
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