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10th March 2026
We’re currently watching the 2025 series of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, and as usual, having some wild reactions to some of the bizarre choices the judges are making about who goes through to the semi-final, and who doesn’t.
We’re also getting annoyed with the conduct of some of the celebrities, who seem to have forgotten (or else just don’t care) that they’re meant to be there at the service of the artists, and that the whole experience is not, in fact, all about them.
Novelist Elif Shafak sat reading a book for most of the four-hour session; musician Cat Burns spent a lot of the time checking her phone; actor Billy Porter kept falling asleep after a busy night at the Oliviers the night before. And so many of the other sitters JUST WON’T KEEP STILL to let their artists get on with their task. I did life modelling for a few years, and I would never have dreamed of behaving like that during a sitting. I think it’s rude, disrespectful, and totally unacceptable.
The other thing that is burning my wick isn’t even part of the programme itself. Each segment is bookended by some often cringeworthy little inserts where a creative professional is sitting next to someone who’s been an influential figure in their lives — a parent, or much more likely, a tutor or a mentor of some kind. We hear isolated, non-contextualised fragments of their conversation, which for the most part sound so insincere that it makes me suspect they’ve been scripted by someone at Sky Arts who has never had a creative idea or experience of their own in their entire lives.
I’ll pick out some of the real belters for you:
“So, my advice to you then was to let your self-doubt fuel you.”
This is the one which really, REALLY makes me squirm every time I hear it. This is the kind of platitudinous motivational mantra I imagine echoes off the walls of marketing agencies and corporate boardrooms; it’s pure contestant-on-The Apprentice-speak; it could very well have been conjured up by AI, for all I know.
I genuinely have no clue what this even means, or what anyone could meaningfully do to action this instruction. I spent the early years of my theatre-writing career learning the hard way about what is useful to actors, namely, a note or a piece of information which they can play, as opposed to a comment or an instruction which they can’t. I honestly think the note of letting self-doubt fuel you is entirely unplayable, entirely unusable, in any creative context.
The main reason I think this is because self-doubt isn’t a constructive force, but a destructive one. It diminishes us; it doesn’t enlarge us. It nibbles away at our confidence in ourselves and our abilities, with the ultimate logical goal of stopping us doing the thing we’re doubting our competence to do.
Quite possibly it’s a self-protective mechanism at its root, discouraging us from taking a risk that might have negative consequences for our wellbeing. It probably traces back to the experience of our ancestors as an admonition against being too curious, just in case putting your weight on that branch or lowering your head to drink or eating the unusually coloured mushroom had fatal consequences. I certainly can’t see it helping anyone with their art-making.
“I remember telling you, you’re not in competition with anybody except yourself.”
I find this one rather useless, too. Anyone trying to do any kind of work within the creative industries, or within any kind of funding landscape, is most definitely in competition with a great number of other people. So there’s that, for a start.
But more than that… This idea of competing with yourself feels like an appalling prospect. It’s bad enough how many people are scrabbling for space, attention and resources around you. Why make yourself a competitor as well?
Also — how could you ever meaningfully hope to win against yourself?
Extensive and expensive psychotherapy might help, with the repeated effort of cognitive brain training to try and support you to overcome your self-imposed barriers. But it sounds like we’ve circled back to self-doubt territory again, and I’m sceptical about most people’s chances (mine included) of that being a battle we can win.
“It’s only you that can make tomorrow better.”
I have to admit, I’m not a fan of this, either. It sounds like it should be etched into a plaque of salt dough and sold from someone’s Etsy shop, or appliquéd in glitter on a small child’s T-shirt. I can see its appeal, especially now that so many people are riddled with Main Character Syndrome: it stokes the fire of delulu vanity which burns so readily across social media platforms and, whether we realise it or not, in the brains of some of our nearest and dearest.
But rational evidence suggests at least two things: A) clearly, there are plenty of other people who can make tomorrow better besides you; and B) your definition of a better tomorrow might not necessarily correspond to everyone else’s definition, especially if the intended beneficiary of “better” is you.
And all that aside, I think the playability of that note is severely limited, too. There’s no sense of how you go about making tomorrow better in there; only a vague and ethereal sense that you can. It leaves you adrift to figure out the really difficult stuff, and do the really hard work, for yourself.
“It’s what a mentor does: you listen and you learn.”
A lot of mentoring relationships are unhelpfully hierarchical and/or unhelpfully transactional. Some mentors position themselves as voices of authority, there to dispense advice, to teach, to expect mentees to follow their example. Some mentees actively want that flatpack kind of arrangement, turning up to take shortcuts, to get their hands on templates, to be told what to do without caring to know how or why those things might be done.
Much healthier, and much more rewarding for everyone involved, is a set-up which shifts from a vertical relationship to a much more horizontal one. So I’d modify the proposition to say that listening and learning is what a mentor does and what a mentee does. Everyone comes out of the process modestly or maybe even radically transformed, and that’s got to count as a win.
“I always knew you were creative, and I just really wanted to you to follow your dream.”
Interestingly, this is the only one that comes from a parent to a child. Before you think I’ve gone soft, I know full well that this kind of supportive parental attitude is not necessarily the norm. BELIEVE ME, I KNOW. But surely you’d have to have a heart of stone, or icy capitalist conservatism running through your veins, or possibly some unfeeling attachment to notions of how an autocratic deity wants us to exist, to find serious fault with this.
The most powerful word in the sentence, I think, isn’t the “always” or the “creative” or even the “dream” — it’s the “just”.
That “just” is a masterpiece of intensification through reduction, carrying with it endless horizons of care, respect and understanding. “I know the world is a horrible place,” it seems to say, “but in spite of all the reasons to give up, to curl up in a ball and cry, you’ve found this thing that you love, a thing that brings you joy and fulfilment, and I want with all my heart for you to do it forever to your own heart’s content.”
Now, that’s something I can get on board with.