Portraits can tell an interesting story about how the sitter feels, if you capture your subject at the right time. In this blogpost I’ll be talking about the experience of drawing caricature portraits
for Friction Arts’ project ‘How Were You’, where we offered a caricature in exchange for a chat about how their last year has been. The responses were varied, sometimes saddening and often suprising.
Read on to learn more about what we’re doing…
BIRMINGHAM IN LOCKDOWN- HOW WERE YOU?
The lockdown has been different kinds of difficult depending on who you speak to. For some it was simple head-melting boredom. Others had financial and childcare struggles. Some lost loved ones.
Friction Arts, funded by Near Neighbours, devised a project that would record the full gamut of these lockdown experiences, and hired me to draw caricature portraits of the people being interviewed.
We set up over a number of days in various locations in Birmingham and created welcoming spaces where I’d be at my easel and another one of friction’s team would be ready to ask the member of public some prompt questions.
Well needless to say the tribulations of the last year were still hovering around people’s minds and it didn’t take a lot of questioning for the floodgates to open.
As the interviewer listened to the anecdotes I would do one of my false-colour pen caricature portraits. These would take 5ish minutes. Afterwords the interviewer would summarise what the sitter had said and I would add that text to the caricatures, resulting in something like one of the caricature portraits below.
Adam holding up his caricature for the How Were You project for Friction Arts 
Adam’s caricature or How Were You project plus text 
Another Balsall Heath caricature from How Were You project 
The washing line of caricatures from the how were you project
CAPTURING THE VARIED OPINIONS OF BIRMINGHAM
As a caricaturist I have for a long time wished to incorporate more storytelling in my work, and seeing as you can only tell so much of a story through the lines and slopes of someone’s face in a caricature, this has meant the addition of written stories that people have recounted while sitting for their portraits. I jumped at the chance of creating these kind of portraits for the guys at Friction Arts because as an organisation they have such a strong practice with regard to collecting oral histories, and I relished the chance to further meld my caricature skills with my oral history skills.
Most importantly though, I was looking forward to working again with a set of great artists I respect and enjoy the company of. And, in PUBLIC, no less!
We set up our gazebo in various spots across Birmingham; Balsall Heath, Stechford and the Birmingham Markets, with each location revealing different challenges and rewards.
The people we chatted to ranged from Covid-skeptics to the faithful, from nervous to gregarious, but all had something to get off their chests.
As a former street caricaturist I’m used to street noise and chaos while I caricature, but on the first day the noise was so bad that we had to add the stories after the fact in quiet moments.
In Stechford we met up with local campaigner Mrs McGhie-Belgrave in her front garden and she regaled us with the trials, successes and secrets of her many years as an activist and community leader.
Outside Birmingham’s markets we did portraits for many elders and people who had hit hard times for whatever reason. I knew that this particular place in Birmingham was considered a kind of safe place for that community, and knew that there would be sometimes shocking stories come out in the portraits, told in that nonchalant Brummie way of course.
For the next outing as a roving caricaturist I visited the Birmingham Rag markets and fruit and veg markets with Albert Smith, a very skilled histories collector who has been frequenting the birmingham markets since the late nineties. The stories we collected together were mostly very sad, and the heartbreak within was juxtaposed strangely with the joy in the portraits.
WHAT NEXT
It’s been a fantastic experience to both get the chance to record and caricature Birmingham at this peculiar time in history, to get out and about again chatting with folks IRL(As they say), and to work again with Friction Arts who have mentored me as well as collaborated with me profusely over the years.
Stay tuned and I’ll let you know whether my compiled caricature portraits are collected in a book or exhibited. Regardless I should be doing more of these caricature portraits at other Friction Arts events in Birmingham over the summer.
I want to thank Sandra Hall, Lee Griffiths, Albert Smith and Savhanha Nguyen and Mia Walters(the newbies who I hadn’t met before but were becoming better and better oral history collectors with every moment I saw them in action!) for allowing me to be part of their team and just enjoy making art collectively again.
If you’d like to read more about the projects and what Friction do, visit their website here… https://www.frictionarts.com/project/how-were-you/
And to see more of my portraits just head over to this website’s portfolio… https://penjones.co.uk/portfolio-new/
For all your Caricaturist needs!- https://penjones.co.uk/