Lesley

The Sktchy app, which is the source of almost all my inspiration photos, is mostly predominantly full of photos of younger people, and mostly young beautiful women. Of course men post photos there too and parents post plenty of photos of their children. But, as in society, people over 40, and especially women over 40, are largely invisible, and for older people , those over 60, even more so. This isn’t true for the Sktchy artist community, of course, just for the “muse” community, the people who posts selfies wanting to be drawn. Most of the images of older people you find if you hunt them down are of other artists who’ve posted a few pictures for their profile. But there are a few wonderful older muses who get drawn often (1) because they are fabulous to draw and (2) because there are so few of them. So if you’re an older person reading this and would like your portrait drawn by lots of different artists download the Sktchy app and upload some good selfies.

I wanted to draw someone older today because I wanted to honour the many thousands of older people who are dying in the UK at the moment and whose deaths are not even being counted properly. It must seem like many of them are invisible to everyone except their loved ones. So it felt important to say that they are not invisible, that they are not forgotten, if I am thinking about them then so are millions of others.

I’ve decided to try to draw a Sktchy portrait of an older person once a week in honour of those dying in the community of coronavirus, mostly older people, many of whose deaths are not being properly recorded.

I painted Lesley with Zecchi watercolours in a Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.