Fresh Paint

June Collier

Presence in figurative art is an underappreciated quality. It takes a certain skill to conjure the feeling that you’re not so much looking at a painting as simply viewing the real person through a veil daubed with pigment. Stand and stare at a Rembrandt portrait or one of Lucian Freud’s later works, for example, and one can’t escape the sensation that the subject is lurking somewhere behind the canvas, obscured from view by a few choice brushstrokes.

The same could be said for June Collier’s work. Hers is a brand of figurative painting steeped in raw human emotion, so much so that if you stood close to one of her canvases, you’d swear you is one of at least nine finished oil paintings of a favourite life model. “Apart from him being an excellent, reliable and very interesting model with a face often expressing some pain and unhappiness – my cup of tea – Phil didn’t have a need to chat much,” she reveals. “This was very important because I have had long-term problems with my limited energy and models wanting to chat would wear me out.”