Christopher Hanson

My storyI'm Christopher, a portrait painter based in the West Midlands.I came to painting the long way round, and I fell for it hard. What captured me wasn't landscape or abstraction but faces — the fact that a few marks in the right places can hold a person's likeness, and something of who they are, for a hundred years after they've gone. Once I saw that, nothing else really interested me.The pivotal moment was deciding to train properly. I studied at the London Atelier of Representational Art, and then, on a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship, at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence — one of the few places still teaching the sight-size method used by the old masters, painting entirely by natural light. Learning that way is slow and humbling. You spend a very long time getting one thing right. But it gave me a method I trust completely, and it's the method I teach.Since then my work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery for the BP Portrait Award, selected twice for the John Moores Painting Prize, and shown with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. I appeared on Sky's *Portrait Artist of the Year*, and my touring exhibition *Portraits in Silence* showed at the Art House Wakefield and the New Art Exchange in Nottingham.Why I love teachingBecause almost everybody thinks they can't draw a face, and almost everybody can.Faces are where people give up. There's a moment in a class where someone who arrived apologising for themselves looks down at what they've made and goes quiet, because it actually looks like a person. That never gets old. I've built my teaching around getting people to that moment quickly — you don't need talent, you need a way of looking, and that can be taught in an afternoon.I teach the way I was taught, minus the four years. No mystique, no jargon, no being made to feel behind. Complete beginners are welcome, and often do the best work, because they haven't yet learned what they think they can't do.Something most people don't knowClassical portrait painters don't draw what they see. They measure it — comparing angles and distances against a plumb line, the way a surveyor works. It's much more like carpentry than magic, which is exactly why it can be taught.