Over the last few months, we’ve had the pleasure of working with Chatterbox and the BBC to support the campaign for Extraordinary Portraits, which launched on BBC One and iPlayer Arts in February.
It’s an absolutely stunning art series which matches real people with extraordinary stories to a selection of portrait makers, who are challenged to turn their experiences into compelling portraits.
Tonight’s episode sees Kelvin Okafor, a hyperreal artist who specialises in pencil portraits, draw Catrin Pugh, a survivor of a bus crash that left her with burns across 95 percent of her body. Kelvin goes to Wales and meets Catrin’s family and speaks to them about how they supported her during her physical and mental recovery. Kelvin describes Catrin as the phoenix that rose from the ashes. We get to see if, after 650 hours of work, Catrin is prepared to see every detail of herself through his eyes.
Kelvin is a hyper-realistic portrait artist, drawing both regular people and celebs. In 2017, he became the first black artist to be permanently exhibited in the House of Commons with his pencil portrait of Bernie Grant. He has drawn model Winnie Harlow, portraying her skin condition vitiligo and now provides a course in hyper-realistic art.
We managed to place a brilliant interview feature with Kelvin in The British Blacklist if you’d like an interesting read before catching the episode later on.
Tom x
Image Credit: BBC / Chatterbox / Robert-Douglas & Tom Grancia
