Almost Real at the National Portrait Gallery
Almost Real at the National Portrait Gallery — I still find it strange to write these words.
This summer, my painting Almost Real will be shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026.
I have been sitting with this news for a while before sharing it. Not because I was not excited. I was completely overwhelmed. But there is a kind of silence that comes after news like this — a silence where the event feels too large to touch directly.
I wanted to feel it fully before I let it out.
Almost Real at the National Portrait Gallery
Almost Real was selected for the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026, one of the most important portrait competitions in the world.
This year, the Award received 1,474 entries from artists across 63 countries. A total of 52 portraits were chosen for the final exhibition. The show opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 25 June 2026 and runs until 7 October 2026.
Since its beginning, the competition has attracted more than 40,000 entries from over 100 countries and has been seen by over 6 million people.
And somewhere inside that vast field of images, Almost Real found its place.
That sentence still feels almost unreal to me.
You can see more of my recent works in the Artworks section of my website.
The beginning of the painting
The painting began with a real encounter.
Connor, a friend from Australia, came into my life through a small café in Portugal. Later, he visited my studio many times and sat for me.
At first, I was looking at him in the usual way a painter looks at a sitter — the structure of the head, the temperature of the skin, the weight of the body in space, the small shifts of expression that happen before language catches them.
Then something changed.
At some point, I noticed how completely he disappeared into his phone.
His body was still there, close to me, present in the studio. But his gaze had moved elsewhere. Not absent exactly — more suspended. Held by another space.
The face remained, but the attention had crossed a threshold.
That moment stayed with me.
A portrait of divided attention
A portrait is usually built around presence.
But in Almost Real, presence is unstable.
The body is near. The mind is somewhere else. The sitter is physically close, but his attention has moved into another field — private, digital, unreachable.
I was interested in this quiet split.
Not a dramatic gesture.
Not a theatrical emotion.
Just a person absorbed into a private digital world.
It is such a familiar contemporary state: intimate, ordinary, slightly disturbing.
We are together, and not together. We look at each other, and through each other. We sit in the same room while part of us disappears into the screen.
I did not want to judge that moment. I wanted to hold it.
Painting allows that kind of attention. It does not need to explain too quickly. It can stay with the almost invisible shift — the gaze turning inward, the body becoming still, the person becoming both present and distant.
Why the title is Almost Real
The title Almost Real came from this instability.
The painting is not only about Connor. It is about the condition of looking at someone who is already looking elsewhere. It is about the strange tenderness and distance of our time — how a face can be close enough to paint, yet unreachable in another way.
I wanted the image to hover between portrait and apparition.
The sitter is real.
The encounter is real.
The painted surface is physical, slow, handmade.
And still, something in the image refuses to settle fully into reality.
It feels caught between the body and the screen, between touch and distance, between attention and disappearance.
That tension is where the painting lives.
Oil painting on OSB panel
Almost Real is an oil painting on OSB panel, 40 × 40 cm.
OSB is not a noble surface. It is rough, industrial, unromantic — almost unattractive before paint touches it.
I was drawn to that.
I did not want a perfect, elegant support. I wanted a surface that resisted me a little.
The texture of the panel interrupts the illusion. It keeps the portrait from becoming too smooth, too polished, too complete. The roughness remains visible underneath the paint, like a reminder that every image is constructed from imperfect material.
For me, that imperfection matters.
It carries something human. It prevents the painting from becoming only an image of a person and turns it into a record of friction — between surface and skin, observation and memory, the real body and the mediated one.
Painting on OSB means accepting resistance.
The material does not disappear politely. It speaks back.
More about my wider portrait practice and exhibitions can be found on my artist biography page.
A small painting in a larger conversation
To have Almost Real at the National Portrait Gallery means more to me than I can easily explain.
The National Portrait Gallery is not just a building filled with faces. It is a place where portraiture is treated as memory, history, psychology, power, vulnerability, and time.
Faces gather there not as decoration, but as evidence of lives lived and looked at.
To place this small painting inside that context feels deeply meaningful.
A studio encounter in Portugal.
A friend’s distant gaze.
The stubborn texture of an OSB panel.
A square painting, 40 × 40 cm.
A moment of attention slipping away.
Now it enters a larger conversation about what portraiture can be today.
And perhaps that is what moves me most.
Portraiture is no longer only about likeness. Maybe it never was. It is about attention. About what remains visible when someone is slipping away. About the fragile pressure of another person’s presence.
Almost Real tries to hold that pressure.
Not to explain it.
Not to solve it.
Just to keep looking.
Exhibition details
Almost Real will be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026.
The exhibition opens on 25 June 2026 and runs until 7 October 2026.
You can find the official exhibition information on the National Portrait Gallery website. You can also read the official HSF Kramer announcement.
I am honoured, overwhelmed, and quietly grateful to be part of it.
See you in London this summer.
For enquiries about available works, commissions, or collaborations, please use the contact page.