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A Verray Parfit Gentil Knight: Richard Ansett’s Portraits of Grayson Perry
The many sides of Sir Grayson Perry are on display at Sotheby’s London in an exhibition of portraits made by award-winning photographer Richard Ansett.
S ome artistic relationships are creative serendipity: blessed comings-together of artist and amanuensis intent on a shared vision and process. Such is the dynamic between ladylike British treasure Sir Grayson Perry and maverick photographer Richard Ansett. Since meeting Perry, at the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, Ansett has worked with this most flamboyant of artists, celebrating their shared love and empathy for British culture’s odder quirks and characteristics.
At Sotheby’s this month, a selling exhibition of Ansett’s portraits of Perry – certainly one of our greatest living Englishmen – takes an overview of the pair’s colourful collaboration over the years. Here, Ansett and Perry’s sprawling web of ideas and inspirations tangle in unique dialogues, resulting in thrillingly original portraiture.
“I wanted him to be represented as a very serious artist that just happens to be in a dress and some lippy.”
- Richard Ansett
Arsalan Mohammad
What was your perspective on Grayson before you began to work with him?
Richard Ansett
I think the thing that stood out most for me was the representation of him photographically. Also, I was very moved and hugely impressed by the sexual-abuse pots – for example, We’ve Found the Body of Your Child from 2003 – because I thought it was such a perfect way of expressing very difficult subjects in a very traditional way. I think I’ve always used photography as a way of crossing lines as well. In my most intimate work, I’m very interested in exploring difficult subjects.
Arsalan Mohammad
You first photographed Perry at his 2013 Reith Lecture. What agenda did you have for that initial shoot?
Richard Ansett
Before I first photographed Grayson, I felt portraits of him were photographically frivolous and lacking in respect for the serious artist I considered him to be. And my agenda, if I had one at all when I first met him, was that I would photograph him in a way that was unique, or in some way insightful. I wanted him to be represented as a very serious artist that just happens to be in a dress and some lippy. I think that’s the queer part of me, that wants people to be taken seriously for the way they live and are. So I’d already started to plot my appropriation of him, even at that early stage.
Arsalan Mohammad
Grayson has said, “All my work is self-portraiture to a certain extent.” How do you, as a portrait-maker, approach a self-portraitist?
Richard Ansett
I can’t speak for him, but clearly I get asked back! I often say frivolously that I’m very funny, and I’m very quick. He’s not hugely tolerant of me when I’m being indecisive. When I’m not being entirely direct about what I want, he gets very impatient indeed. For the most part, I am Machiavellian, I am deeply driven and I have agendas. But the least Machiavellian part of me is how I get people to trust me. I think that’s up to them to decide that. I think people read me as entirely authentic, because you can truly believe I would potentially burn your house down to get a great photograph.
Arsalan Mohammad
Have you ever actually done that?
Richard Ansett
I’ve thought about it.
Arsalan Mohammad
I find myself completely believing you.
Richard Ansett
Yeah, you should. I think there is an unpleasant side to me when I am with the camera that existentially, would betray everything if I felt there was a chance of taking a great image.
Arsalan Mohammad
So you and Grayson connect in terms of personality. When you are shooting him, you both are committed to securing an honest and genuine portrait.
Richard Ansett
Being frequently in the orbit of somebody like Grayson, I’ve learned a huge amount about what it’s like to be an artist of that calibre. If you observe what it might be like to be him, that’s fascinating. He’s still that same person that comes from South Wales, as well as being this huge star. He encompasses all those things into his work and into his personas. He’s always the icon and the iconoclast. You think about people like Dali, whose personality became their artwork, as much as their art itself.
Arsalan Mohammad
How does his approach and perspective on making art chime with yours, in terms of process?
Richard Ansett
I personally feel like we share an interest in exploring the realities of British life. One of the things I enjoy about my work with him is that most of my archive is based on photographs of 15-year-old pregnant girls from Manchester housing estates, or a woman in prison who’s self-harmed, or just portraits of British life, and the complexities of that. Or in the complexities behind two-dimensional nationalism. I feel like we share an interest in that.
Exhibition Highlights
The Little Death
“Mortality is an interesting thing to explore with Grayson, because you can see the aging artist behind the makeup. This was appropriated from a TV documentary in which one of the subjects was death. We spoke about doing the same thing as a portrait, changing the outfit and the scene around him. We got one of his oldest dresses out, his widow’s weeds, and I got some taffeta and threw it over his head, and he did the makeup. I’ve named it Little Death, which is a very Grayson title! There’s something very delicious about turning up looking inappropriately fabulous to someone else’s funeral. It’s very diva-like. To turn up looking that fabulous and upstaging the corpse.”
Land of Hope and Glory
“This was done just after Brexit. My ideas of Britishness were being explored by using Grayson as my vessel, with the little Union Jack flag, facing Europe across the Channel. The Union Jack is a tiny little flag, and it’s just, like, meh. But it’s on a cliff edge as well, so there’s some suicidal ideation going on there, too. It’s very ambivalent, and I think that ambivalence is very much a representation – if you’re talking about how a picture can represent a person, I would say what I try and do is incorporate some sense of confluence of the person and the character into the very essence of the portrait itself. Also, I like to think that if you were in a boat coming across the British channel towards England, that could be the first thing that you would see, representing this country.”
Transfuturism II
“I’m always planning and thinking about my shoots being potentially more than the reason why we’re creating them in the first place. There’s always this potential to reappropriate them and the Transfuturism series is a deliberately crass appropriation of his image. I’m kind of making a point here, with Transfuturism. I just started cutting him out and pasting him really badly onto these terrible backgrounds, without permission. I never asked him. They’re deliberately terrible. This one, when it was originally created it was part of a series and I was conscious that no one wanted to go near the chador with a bargepole, which I think it was such a waste.”
American Beauty
“This was very much inspired by Dolly Parton. There’s a certain photographic aesthetic in America that’s very American Vogue, American Vanity Fair – that heavy soft box, dark shadow. I’d seen rushes from a television programme about Grayson and there’s a scene where he’s on his motorbike crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. I was so angry – nobody thought for a moment that that might be a good opportunity to take a photograph of him! I had a good relationship with the filmmaker Channel 4, and they threw some money at it. We booked the biggest studio we could find, and I just went totally Annie Leibovitz. We had a huge Cecil B. DeMille-esque wind machine, we had a wig made, which was quite a Dolly-like wig, and we got him on the motorbike.
“I wanted this sort of blood-red but fake painted sunrise. It had to have that fakery about it. It’s very important, like the fake flowers in Birth, as well. It’s always got to have that element of, ‘This is a photoshoot. This isn’t real.’ And Grayson just became possessed by the joy of being in a 1980s photoshoot. It was just so much fun, and I was screaming at him, ‘You’re beautiful!’. And you can tell in the picture, his sense of pure joy in being documented. I think they’re the most joyous, and least self-conscious pictures I have taken of him.”
