Portrait artist Edward Sutcliffe wins the BP Travel Award by London’s National Portrait Gallery

We talk to the Dubai-based artist Edward Sutcliffe, who has won the prestigious BP Travel Award and an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

The Dubai-based British figurative artist Edward Sutcliffe with his painting of Glenda Jackson in his home studio in JLT. Sarah Dea /The National

You have to get really close to Edward Sutcliffe’s paintings to detect the brushstrokes. At first glance, they are so realistically rendered that they look like photographs showing every line and crease of the subject’s face.

It’s an extraordinary talent that has earned Sutcliffe many awards. Two weeks ago, the British artist, who moved to Dubai last year, returned from London, where he is participating for an impressive seventh time in the exhibition that is part of the BP National Portrait Award.

Dubbed by the British press as the Oscars of portraiture, the award is certainly one of the most important portrait prizes in the world and Sutcliffe’s continued selection places him among the top in his field.

But this year, he was also given the BP Travel Award, an annual award to allow artists to experience working in a different environment on a project related to portraiture.

He has been awarded a grant of £6,000 (Dh37,750) to travel to Compton, Los Angeles, to spend time with a group of people whose lives have been changed by the Compton Cricket Club. He will leave Dubai later this month and spend four weeks with the club, an initiative started 20 years ago to encourage and empower the disaffected youth of a neighbourhood rife with lawlessness.

During that time, Sutcliffe will sketch, take photographs and document the players. Upon returning to Dubai, he will work on a selection of figurative portraits to be exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London next year.

“It is a fantastic opportunity and I’m delighted,” says Sutcliffe. “The Compton Cricket Club is an amazing story, rich in character and powerful in emotion that I am inspired to paint.”

Sutcliffe says that he has been studying baroque painting, which is a lot more dramatic than his normal style, and wants to take inspiration from that while painting the poses of cricket players.

“One of the things I am trying to do is get more movement in my paintings, so that is the avenue I will be going down. I am going to put everything I have into this project.”

Sutcliffe, who has exhibited all over the world, had his first solo show in Dubai in February at Dubai Community Theatre & Arts Centre (Ductac) where he showed his portraits of the Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson, Sir Paul Stephenson, the former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock.

He also unveiled his latest work, Copycat, which is currently on show in London for the National Portrait Award.

Copycat is a two-part painting of an infamous fraudster named John Myatt who went to prison for forging 200 paintings. Sutcliffe painted a portrait of him and then inverted and distorted the image and sent a smaller version of it to a Chinese forger in the city of Dafen, where they specialise in reproducing European paintings.

“With the John Myatt painting, I was interested in making a forgery of a forger and the idea of mimicry,” says Sutcliffe. “It is the most ambitious and complicated painting I have done so far. My opinion is that if you want to be good, you can’t just rely on the talent of rendering. It has to be about the world we live in, it has to have ideas pulsing through it and that is what my work is about.”

• The BP National Portrait Award at The ­National Portrait Gallery in London runs ­until September 21. Edward Sutcliffe’s paintings for the Travel Award will be shown next June as part of the 2015 edition