Mahalia, Rising Star places a contemporary Black British vocalist at the centre of a visual language historically complicit in marginalisation. Drawing on Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics while actively interrupting their gaze, the painting confronts questions of mastery, presence, and cultural memory.

Created in resistance to spectacle, speed, and aesthetic flattening, this work insists on discipline, subjecthood, and the dignity of becoming. It asks the viewer not to consume, but to remain.

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In this new instalment of Letters from the Studio, I open the door to the beginnings of my portrait of Sol Gabetta, a work that listens before it speaks. The first layer meets the canvas through music: the arc of movement, the breath between phrases, the subtle pauses that reveal the life within the performer.

Rooted in four hundred years of artistic lineage, this painting grows from a way of seeing shaped by time, silence, and careful observation. Here, the aim is not likeness alone, but the interior world that precedes it, the emotion before the note, the recognition before the gesture.

I share why every composition is drawn by hand, how sketches give form to fleeting expressions, and how the music itself becomes a collaborator in the process. The episode also touches on Mastering Light & Shadow™, a course created for artists seeking to overcome flatness and reconnect with the discipline of seeing.

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This episode offers a reflection on The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel. While the book powerfully restores many women to the narrative of art history, from Renaissance pioneers to modern visionaries, its final chapters reveal a gap that continues to shape our understanding of women’s contributions today.

The women who uphold and advance the classical craft of painting from life, artists working with discipline, sensitivity, and a profound commitment to the human presence, remain largely unacknowledged. Their omission underscores a persistent hierarchy in contemporary art discourse, one that prizes conceptual innovation while overlooking the mastery that once allowed earlier women artists to claim their place.

Here I examine this paradox and argue for a more complete history: one that embraces the full spectrum of women’s artistic practices across five centuries, including the living lineage of classical realism.

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