Burnt Sienna Ground, Blue Sky Above
By Pierre Benjamin
There is a Steve McQueen portrait sitting in Pierre Benjamin's Cardiff studio that no one will see. He painted it, looked at it the next day, heard what his peers said — sketchy, didn't quite work — and put it away. He did not repaint it. He left it exactly as it was and moved on. "It's part of the dead-end and a natural route that every artist needs to explore," he told me. The painting stays in the studio as a kind of record. He seems at peace with that.
Benjamin is a French painter based in Wales, and his subject matter is the recognisable face: Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery, James Brown, Audrey Hepburn. The canvases are oil on cotton or panel, figurative, worked in warm grounds and cool blues, with geometric shapes — triangles mostly, and the occasional circle — laid into the background. He has shown at the Forge Art Fair in London and in group exhibitions across Wales and England. He also teaches Game Art at university level, a career that runs alongside the studio practice without, he said, much friction between the two. Both require a working knowledge of colour, light, and the fundamentals of visual hierarchy. He does not use the word "unlearning."
Before the Game Art degrees at the University of South Wales, there was a year at the École du Louvre in Paris studying History of Art. That sequence — Louvre, then animation, then games, then oil paint — sounds like it should produce tensions, but Benjamin does not experience it that way. What carries across, he said, is a set of principles: colour, composition, light, hierarchy. The medium changes; the underlying logic does not.
His process starts before the canvas. He sketches in pencil first, working out the intensity of values before committing to paint. Once he moves to canvas, every surface gets the same primer: a non-absorbent acrylic ground from Michael Harding, a manufacturer based near his home in Cardiff, applied in burnt sienna. The colour is a dark ochre, and it sets a mid-value base across the whole surface. "So you don't start from white, which is a much brighter value — you already have mid-value in place, which makes it so much easier to lay the oil paint on it." The first layer of oil goes on thin, for the same practical reason: if something is wrong, a cloth removes it and the warm ground comes back up, ready to go again.
Blue is the colour he returns to across almost every portrait, regardless of subject. Ultramarine, Prussian, indigo — he distinguishes between them with the precision of someone who has spent time thinking about it. The preference goes back to childhood in the south of France, the particular quality of the sky there. It is a practical attachment as much as a personal one: blue reads cool against the warm sienna beneath, and that temperature contrast is central to how he builds a face.
The Amy Winehouse painting is the piece he is most satisfied with in the current body of work. He had originally planned a longer composition that included her arms, but pulled back to chest-up when the sketches suggested the tighter frame would hold better. The final painting — oil on cotton canvas, 2026 — keeps the head at a slight tilt, consistent with how she tends to appear in photographs, and the palette runs to blues, lavender, and a range of oranges. The background geometry is triangular, scaled to sit behind her without competing. He described the balance as iterative: find the right scale, correct it if it doesn't work, keep going. For the skin, he used indigo and alizarin crimson to arrive at a purplish undertone that sits beneath the warmer passages on her cheeks and nose.
The eyes came first, as they do on all his portraits. Get the eyes wrong on a famous face and everything else collapses. "The eyes are the windows to the soul, as everyone says, and if you get that wrong onto a character that is very famous, everything seems to fall apart." In the Winehouse piece, the iris picks up the burnt sienna of the ground — the warm tone surfacing through the cool surround. He said that layering shifted the whole feel of her expression. He uses glazes to adjust after the fact, letting passages dry for a few days before coming back with a warmer or cooler tone. Because the ground is warm, he tends to glaze cooler, and watches whether that adds depth to the nose, the lips, the eyes.
He would consider pushing the hair further — more detail, more development — but he holds back deliberately. The hair is secondary to the face in the hierarchy of the piece, and adding detail there would pull the eye away from where he wants it. He described the choice in terms of focus rather than finish: more detail does not automatically mean more presence, and in this case it would work against the painting.
The James Dean portrait came directly after the McQueen that didn't work. Benjamin looked at what had gone wrong — the McQueen felt too edgy/angular for a subject whose face is rounder in shape — and chose a subject whose bone structure suited the approach. Dean's cheekbones, nose, and chin are sharper, and Benjamin said the painting benefited from that alignment between the face and the way he wanted to use his brushes. He worked with short, flat, squared brushes to carve those edges, and managed the light so that warm tones fell on one side of the face and cooler tones on the other. The eyes and nose and lips were matched as closely as possible to photographic reference, cross-checked from multiple angles before he considered them done.
The James Brown portrait, also oil on cotton canvas from 2026, took him somewhere different in terms of colour. The background shifts to green, orange, and pink — a combination he had not used much before — and there is very little blue in the piece. The hair is indigo rather than black, which keeps it from going flat. He wanted to show Brown's stage energy, the extreme quality of his facial expressions mid-performance, and he used a strong rim light on the hair to suggest stage lighting. The darker skin tones allowed for a higher contrast against the open mouth, the teeth, the highlights on the nose and cheeks. He said he knew from the pencil sketches that the values needed to stay bold, and he did not pull back once he moved to canvas.
The near-sellout the artist references occurred at an exhibition in Wales, not at the Forge Art Fair in London. He mentioned this once, without elaboration — evidence that the work finds an audience, offered as context rather than credential. Since then he has continued showing in group exhibitions at Canvas Gallery in London and Poole, and at library venues in Dinas Powys and Rhoose in Wales. The pace is steady rather than rapid, and he seems to prefer it that way.
The tension in all these portraits — and Benjamin is aware of it as a technical problem, a real one with real consequences — is the gap between likeness and stylisation. Every decision about how sharp or soft an edge should be, how intense a value, how warm or cool a shadow, is also a decision about how far from the photograph the painting is allowed to travel. He described it as a fine line, and the Steve McQueen in the studio is the evidence of what happens when the line is crossed. He did not dramatise it. Some paintings work. Some don't. The ones that don't stay in the studio.
"I am not simply painting celebrities," he said at one point, placing the whole series in its plainest terms. The faces are the starting point. What he is after is the energy, the sensitivity, the particular quality of presence that made each person memorable. Whether a given painting gets there is a question he answers with a cloth, a fresh look the next morning, and, if necessary, a conversation with whoever happens to be in the studio.
The most successful piece in the current roster, by his own account, is the Winehouse. The cool glaze around the eyes, the warm iris pulling the burnt sienna back up through the surface, the hair held deliberately loose so the face can hold its ground. He said he got everything pretty much spot on in terms of how it feels in relation to how she looks. That is as close to a verdict as he offers.
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