Alan Coulson And Ray Richardson - Portrait insights - Bp portrait award 2012

This is my painting of a friend, Richie. A little bit of background about me - I'm an artist, I work predominately in portraiture. I have been painting for around 5 years, I have been so lucky to have shown on three occasions at the National Portrait Gallery and this year to have won third prize for my painting. It is a painting of a friend, he is a practicing artist and we are about the same age 34-35. At the age of around thirty we had been floating around - 'what we going to do with ourselves?' - and started to think ... well it was always going to be portraiture for me and he was always going to follow a creative path and hadn't found what it was, so he's immersed himself in his work. Before I gave up my job in retail, we were standing in shops together all day, clothes shops, quite bored. I left and I thought I'm not going back to that job, I'm going to paint! So I've been painting furiously. I should say actually I, speaking to you guys, I came to this gallery with my school when I was seventeen and it planted a seed which has always sort of frustrated me I'd come here and visit the BP (Portrait Award) since I've lived in London and I'd think one day I'm going to do that. It took me quite a while, but eventually I just threw myself into it. So yeah, it's not something that you're necessarily going to leave school and pursue a career as an artist or as anything really, but for me it took me quite a while but I'm sort of on that track now. My name is Ray Richardson. I painted this painting of a friend of mine who's called Frank, but everyone just calls him Irish Frank and everybody knows him. I've made portraits of him before but I wanted to make a full length portrait and everyone was kind of going 'you got to do it about sort of six foot wide, or something like that' because he's like a big bloke and you got to get that across. But I wanted to give a sense of a big man but in a small scale. I could never ever have got him to stood there to paint that, because he has a really bad back and he didn't want to be painted with his cane. I don't think there's any real rules to the way you make a painting. If you have to use photographic references or you use things from real life or you take things from books or stories and you put those into you work, I just think it's whatever makes it interesting for you is the most important thing.