Interviewed by Mia Funk & Virginia Moscetti

How can the arts help cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What does visual art teach us about consciousness and the human condition?

Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait with Yeo is a provisional necessity for any 21st century icon. His work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, is the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Yeo’s course on portrait painting is available now on BBC Maestro.

JONATHAN YEO

What are you trying to do with the portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. And then, you're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

VR Projects & Making Painted Sculptures

Painting is a two-dimensional thing. You're basically taking real, three-dimensional things and making them into fake, two-dimensional ones. When you get into the 3D space, some of those distinctions aren't there anymore. I remember when I showed David Hockney the VR project I'd been working on a few years ago, and he put his finger on this quite well. Most art is about perspective. Certainly, for what he is interested in. As soon as you see something in 3D, whether it's a physical sculpture or a virtual object, that's not there anymore because you're in the space with whatever's being shown, so you're in a very different place.

The Influence of Technology on Art

With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He's quite self-effacing and doesn't really want to be the center of attention, so he's like, I'm not sure I want to have a big portrait of me. Then, he mentioned that he'd been fascinated by self-portraiture as a kid, so much so that when he was doing his industrial design degree, he wrote his thesis on artists' self-portraits. Fast forward a few years, and we are all taking photos every day and learning really fast how to compose images and read images and why they've been cropped in a certain way. All these things, which were probably the preserve of artists and art historians in the past, are suddenly things that kids are thinking about because it's the way they communicate with each other. So I think that that shift is interesting.

The Future of Art, Technology & Education

I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work.

Images courtesy of Jonathan Yeo

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Virginia Moscetti with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Virginia Moscetti. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.