Your mum is great. Think about all of that food she cooked for you. She incubated you as an ungrateful fetus in her womb for nine months. Then she gave birth to you. Then she ironed your shirts. For this family issue of the magazine we got four of the one hundred artists that have made portraits of their mothers for a show aptly titled Mothers at the Sartorial Art gallery to write about their inspiration, their work and their mummys.

Peter Harris [above]

"This portrait is a hybrid of me and my mum. My wife tells me that I often get a look in my eye that belongs to my mother. Being a man, I look physically more like my father, but this expression that lurks within me is where my mother shines through. Rather than something physical, I’ve inherited character traits from my mother, quirks such as this look.

My mother hasn’t seen the painting, but if she did she’d probably laugh. It  makes me laugh because it’s very accurate of a certain aspect of her. It’s something I became familiar with as a child. If she was unhappy she would just look through you. If I could put this portrait into a time in my mothers life it would just before my father and sister died."

Geraldine Swayne



"I am so glad that Harry [Curator of Mothers] asked me to be in the mother show. I consider him a really bright point of light in a dingy world. He is unique and London should be honoured to have him around. He is in my list of artists that make things bearable; Hogarth, John Hurt, Ian Dury, Billy Childish, John Lydon, Martin Amis, Derek Jarman, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sickert, Iain Sinclair, Ray Davies and Harry Pye can come round to my house any time they like.

"My picture took a couple of hours of hard work. I know my mother's face better than I thought and I was really pleased with it. It was too sweet though, so I changed some things a few days later; took out the pretty shirt and added the fruit. My mother has fierceness and a power, which has saved a lot of lives but can be overwhelming without a crisis to manage.

"I wanted her to look stripped down to a kind of selfless uniform offering food. It’s what she’s all about. She’s at her best around unimaginable trauma. She ran a tropical diseases ward in Nigeria in the 50’s and handled a lot of scary things without any sort of safety net. She also likes to party and laugh a lot, unsurprisingly, since she’s seen so much death... too much; holding onto people as they slip away. I am in awe of her and owe her everything:  respect for food, a love of plants and books and a savage anger towards injustice."


Mat Humphrey



"For me, the notion of painting my mother was very difficult, and also extremely rewarding. It forced me to sit down and think harder and more specifically about her than at any other time in my life. It also made me look harder at her face than perhaps I had before. I photographed her many different times, with the portrait in mind, and spent time watching her different expressions. I saw how the years had affected her skin and the way it creased and folded as different emotions took shape in the muscles around her eyes and mouth. I waited until I felt like I had captured some of the glint in her eyes that betrayed her impish humour.

"The colours I used were emotionally triggered. I used browns for her skin tones, as it felt right. Earthy and permanent. I gave her eyes a turquoise that belied her power, rather than the true colour of her gaze. And I gave her iconic gold radiations, as she is my creator- not god. I found it hard to end the painting. I didn’t want an end. It takes no psychologist  to work out why. She was moved when she saw the result, and I was relieved at that. It felt like an honest and emotional thing to do, and I believe that everyone, whether they consider themselves to be an artist or not, should paint a picture of their mother."

Rowland Smith



"The portrait is a picture of my mum at a party with my dad from the time before they were married and long before I was born. It’s copied from a small black and white picture which I had to enlarge to fill the canvas. My mum likes it because it is not a present day portrait. My mum compares herself unfavourably to A Grotesque Old Woman by Quinten Massys. I disagree and so do most other people who meet her but I guess mum is comparing herself now to the young woman she once was.

This brings me back to the questions that were going round in my mind while I painted, making me think about who ‘my mum’ is. Is the young woman in the photo my mum or is my mum the woman who brought me up? Did she have any idea that she would be my mother when the photo was taken? What was she thinking of back then? What were the things that were important to her? It made me more aware of my mum being a person independent of me, with a past and a future... how much more of life she has seen."

Mothers is on at Sartorial Contemporary Art 101a Kensington Church Street, London W8 7LN. For more information and opening times hit http://sartorialart.com/mothers_show.html.

(ed - Don't forget, Mothering Sunday next weekend!)