To celebrate the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Tatler commissioned a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by a Commonwealth artist for the July front cover. The portrait, by Nigerian artist Oluwole Omofemi, was followed in July 2023 by Trinidadian artist Sarah Knights’s portrait of the newly crowned King Charles III. Together, they sowed the germ of an idea, which has recently borne fruit as a new artists’ residency. The Akoje Residency was announced earlier this year, founded by rugby star Maro Itoje and his business partner Khalil Akar in collaboration with the King’s Foundation, for African, Caribbean and diasporic artists to spend time at Dumfries House in Scotland to focus on their artistic practice. In tandem with this exciting development, Tatler is delighted to commission a third portrait in the series. What better way to show our support than to choose as a subject our much-loved and highly respected Princess of Wales – and who better to paint her than fellow mother-of-three, British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor?
Uzor first shot to prominence in 2020 when she undertook a wide-reaching project using portraits to highlight historical figures of the African diaspora who had played a part in English history and the complex relationships they had with Victorian society. Her striking portrait of Sara Forbes Bonetta came to the attention of English Heritage and became the catalyst for their major initiative Painting Our Past. Inspired by Uzor’s work, the charity went on to commission five other portraits from five other artists, an achievement of which Uzor is rightly very proud. ‘Sara’s story is very important because it helps to bring the complete story of our history and to question some of our own prejudices,’ she says.
I talk to Uzor as her first solo show is opening at the Niru Ratnam gallery in Fitzrovia. She recently finished an MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, where, in 2021, she won the inaugural Milein Cosman Scholarship for Drawing. She has been given just three weeks to complete the Tatler commission but is unfazed by the challenge. ‘I work quickly,’ she says. ‘Once I start painting, it will only take me two or three days.’
She tells me that her practice is driven by her interest in history, particularly diasporic culture and its manifestation in personal and public memory. The act of researching and observation is just as important to her in building a picture of the sitter as the research material she discovers. Each body of work is centred on a particular research focus, drawing from a variety of references, including archival images, historical paintings, family photographs and literature.
For this commission, she predicts that she will spend a lot more time preparing and researching than actually painting. There is a lot of material to cover – there are more than 189,000 pictures of the Princess of Wales in the Getty Images archive, she tells me. But she doesn’t seem daunted and intends to look at as many photos as she possibly can before basing the final work on a composite image.
‘When you can’t meet the sitter in person, you have to look at everything you can find and piece together the subtle human moments revealed in different photographs: do they have a particular way of standing or holding their head or hands? Do they have a recurrent gesture?’ Has the recent video released by the Princess of Wales’s household, in which she explains her cancer diagnosis, given Uzor a new perspective? ‘Without a doubt,’ she replies. ‘All my portraits are made up of layers of a personality, constructed from everything I can find about them.’ The video has added another layer to Uzor’s reading of the princess, showing ‘a moment of dealing with something difficult, speaking from the heart, having the courage to tackle it head-on’.
Uzor places a lot of emphasis on how both the visible and invisible parts of a character can be revealed through a painting. She works with acrylics and will start with the background, which she will paint in a colour wash. For the Princess of Wales, she already has a colour in mind: ‘A green-blue, which I chose based on her eye colour and also trying to get elements of being in a garden and on water – rowing being one of her [favourite] sports and in some pictures.’
The next step will be the figure, which she will construct from elements pulled together from the countless photographs she has used for inspiration. The important thing for her in any portrait is to convey the layers of the subject’s personality – in this case, more specifically to capture the dichotomy between the public persona and the private. Uzor expresses huge admiration for the Princess of Wales: ‘She has really risen up to her role – she was born for this. She carries herself with such dignity, elegance and grace.’
Uzor’s palpable confidence comes from a lifetime of expressing herself through art. From as early as she can recall, she would record her memories through drawing. Her father remembers how, when she was a very young child, they went on a road trip together and when they got home, she painted the whole journey in detail. ‘I think a lot of my work has to do with evoking a memory,’ she says, ‘the spectator looking in at a moment in time.’
She was born Hannah Hasiciimbwe in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1982, but came to England with her parents as a baby and lived here until the age of two, ‘so I started walking and talking in England’. The family returned to Zambia, where Uzor spent her formative school years. She remembers constantly doodling and finds it difficult now to pinpoint exactly when she painted her first portrait: ‘I can’t quite remember because I have been painting for so long. It was probably during my teenage years and probably a portrait of one of my siblings, as I was always painting them.’
As she progressed in high school, it became apparent that her father was counting on her to ‘do something sensible’, so she put her art to one side and returned to the UK to study for a BA in computer studies, going on to work in business development and digital marketing. For her creative outlet, she turned to music, and it was during this time that she met and married her husband, Peter, through their church, where she sang and he played the guitar. Peter is a software developer, but Uzor also describes him as ‘a creative in music’ and music clearly plays an important part in their home life. Their two eldest children, Nathan, 11, and Rinnah, seven, both sing and play piano; Nathan is also a drummer.
Uzor’s mother died in 2016, which was a life-changing moment for her. It prompted her to return to her real passion: painting. She enrolled at Kensington and Chelsea College (now Morley College), where she was the winner of the 2021 Higher Education Award. She doesn’t regret her years in the corporate sector at all; in fact, she attributes much of the way she approaches a project to the discipline required in her former working life. ‘It taught me to respect deadlines,’ she explains.
She is clearly exceptionally capable and organised. As we speak, she keeps her three-month-old baby, Gabriel, occupied on her lap throughout our conversation. ‘My studio was previously in central London, but since Gabriel, I have painted at home,’ she says. The wall behind her is covered in pink and green sticky notes – not randomly stuck on a board, but arranged in a regular grid – on which she has written exactly what she is going to do and when. Knowing my own approach to lists – to write them endlessly and then ignore them – I ask her whether she follows these instructions. ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘I would be lost without them. At the moment, I try to work mostly at night, when the children are asleep, and do my best to keep family time on Saturdays.’
When I ask about her artistic influences, she cites Toulouse Lautrec ‘because he both paints and draws’, as does she. I can see the same sense of balance in her work, the subject often sitting off-centre against a complementary background. She also admires Gauguin for colour and Cézanne for construction; and her contemporary art heroes include Kerry James Marshall, Barbara Walker and Yinka Shonibare, all of whom she admires for the importance of history to their work.
What she doesn’t mention, but what strikes me as I am talking to this articulate, confident yet unassuming artist, is how many qualities she seems to share with her subject. Both have three young children whose importance to them ranks more highly than anything else. ‘I sense with her the joy of motherhood,’ Uzor says. Yet both women appear to juggle family life and high-achieving professional roles with a skill that belies this complexity. Uzor dismisses it simply as ‘passion – if you believe in it enough, you will make it work’.
This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Tatler, on sale 30 May
