Fionn Wilson

I met former Labour MP Dennis Skinner (the ‘Beast of Bolsover’) at the Houses of Parliament on five occasions, in 2017. He’d agreed to meet me after I emailed him and asked if I could paint him. I won’t forget the time I spent listening to his stories and his singing (he’d often break into song — I remember ‘This is My Lovely Day’, which he said was one of his mother’s favourites).

He showed me the The Chapel of St. Mary Undercroft, the broom cupboard where suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid and the plaque to her which was put there by Tony Benn. He was always generous-spirited, honest and direct — just as you’d expect him to be — and he often made me laugh. I showed him a few portraits I’d painted and he particularly seemed to like the one of the former general secretary of the RMT, Bob Crow (“Oh aye, that’s him.”)

I painted three portraits of Dennis — one is now part of the public collection of the Marx Memorial Library, one is part of the public collection of the National Coalmining Museum for England (see previous post ‘Portraits of left-wing figures’) and the other, of Dennis in front of his favourite magnolia tree in Hyde Park, is with Dennis himself as part of his private collection (I based this portrait of him on stills from the film below).

There’s a great film about Dennis Skinner which gives a real feel of him as a person, which I highly recommend, Dennis Skinner: Nature of the Beast (2017) (produced by Shut Out the Light and directed by Daniel Draper).

www.dennisskinnerfilm.co.uk

I was delighted when John Dunn, from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, asked if he could use an image of one of the portraits to illustrate an article he’d written about Dennis losing his Bolsover seat in the 2019 general election (see second image below).

#painting #coalmining #dennisskinner #portrait #art #portraiture #figurativeart #figurativepainting #acrylicpainting #politics #socialism #labourparty