One day, nearly six years ago, I had to sit completely still for several hours at a time. I was having my portrait painted, you see, by three artists for the Sky programme Portrait Artist of the Year. As far back as primary school, I was diagnosed by several adults as having ants in my pants. I am afraid those ants are still there, poor things. What lives they have led. I find keeping still even for a few minutes a real challenge at the best of times. For two two-hour sessions, under the close scrutiny of the artists and several television cameras, it was nothing short of traumatic. I can only compare the feeling to the odd occasions when I’ve experienced claustrophobia, trapped in a lift or a jam-packed aircraft cabin on a long flight.
When the ordeal came to an end, I was invited to view the likenesses these artists had created. One was the work of a woman from the West Country. I will not name her, because I can’t imagine this was the proudest hour of her artistic career and doubtless she doesn’t want to be reminded of it. In her portrait, I looked like how I might appear after a heavy night out, if viewed through some misshaped glass. I’ve never been a great admirer of my face, but this was a picture that even my fiercest critic would acknowledge didn’t flatter me. To put it another way: even when my self-esteem has hit rock bottom, I never think of myself as looking quite this bad.
The other two portraits were really good. One was a colourful affair featuring me looking thoughtfully, but amiably, into the middle distance. I’ll be honest with you: I quite fancied myself (and I don’t say that very often). Ooh, I thought: that’s caught the blue in my eyes just right.
The third portrait was an altogether more severe creation, in charcoal and chalk. It was plainly a very skilful piece of work, but there was something about it I couldn’t love. It looked to me like the kind of portrait an eastern European dictator might have commissioned to convey a benevolent but not-to-be-trifled-with authority. There was a subtle but unmistakeable air of menace about me. It reminded me of the images of President Tito I used to see as a kid adorning a wall in every shop, office, bar and restaurant of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The deal with the show was that I was allowed to keep one of the three portraits. A friend who worked on the programme advised me to go for the severe one. But because I found it so much more pleasant to look at, I went for the colourful one. My friend told me I was an idiot. Although the Titoesque portrait was judged the winner of this episode of the show, I went away happy. Even when the chap who painted it, Gareth Reid, went on to win the whole competition (for his picture of Graham Norton), I still preferred the colourful one. I still preferred it even when the work of the newly crowned portrait artist of the year shot up in value and I was offered the Tito-style one for £15,000.
The more people told me I had made an idiotic decision, the more I preferred the one I had chosen. And I still bloody well prefer it, even though that confounded winning portrait is now featuring at an exhibition of the show’s best art at a gallery in Warwickshire and worth even more. My beloved colourful one, however, hangs unloved in my mum’s bedroom. She is open to offers in excess of £15,000, if you’re interested.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 24 February 2022 because captions of earlier versions, owing to incorrect information supplied to us by Sky Arts, attributed Corinne Young’s painting to another artist. This has been corrected.
