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Saturday 3 December 2011

John Hurt after Owen Lennox (Artist and illustrator sketch)

This is a pencil sketch copy from a painting in this months edition of artist and illustrator.
The artist is Owen Lennox who has been shortlisted for the artist of the year award 2011 and is an amazing artist.
I think I have lengthened his nose too much, but am happy enough with it as a 30 minute effort.


I have deleted the images from the article due to copyright but dont think they'll mind me putting the article in. I guess you could easly find him online.

Here's the article in full.


Owen Lennox, is an artist and art teacher who graduated from Sheffield in 1978. Since then, he has been teaching and gaining commissions for notable sitters, such as Baroness Thatcher, Gerald Ford 38th president of the USA and Sir Steve Redgrave, to name a few.
His painting of Keith Allen has been shortlisted for our Artist of the Year 2011 competition and his brilliantly detailed portrait of John Hurt has been published in the December issue of Artists and Illustrators. For all these reasons and more, we felt it necessary to ask Owen if he could reveal to us his tricks of the trade.
“Discovering you have a talent is one thing but to achieve anything worthwhile you need the determination and the want to develop it”, he admits. “There always has to be something that grabs my attention. More often than not it’s a face; the colour, the light, the character. If I can’t find something to inspire me I paint anything.”
With a varied collection of artwork available to view and buy online on our site, we wanted to know how people have been receiving his work.
“The response to being shortlisted for Artist of the Year has been phenomenal. Lots of people have been looking and commenting on my work through Portfolio Plus,” he confirms.
“As a practising painter it’s good to engender interest in my work. I have had a couple of commissions and sold some work from my back catalogue as a result, which is always gratifying.”
Owen has worked extremely hard to get where he is today, having balanced his time as an artist with being a teacher. He believes that there’s nothing more inspiring than working with young people and would always want to continue teaching regardless of his success. With such a passion for imparting knowledge of art onto young people, we were curious to find out how much art was present during his growing up.
“When I was about 12 on a miserable summer’s day in Sunderland I was bored so my mother suggested I went to the art gallery. There were some paintings of the river wear by L. S. Lowry. Lowry used to spend six months a year in Sunderland staying at the Seaburn Hotel not far from where I lived. If my friends and I saw him walking along the promenade we used to follow him. He’d get rid of us by accidentally dropping a few coins.We’d wait until he was out of sight before picking them up.
I thought he had a pretty good life- famous, living in a posh hotel and having money to throw away- all because he could draw and paint. It was later I found out that he’d had a regular job till he was 65 and only painted in the evenings and weekends.”

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