The smell of paint, turpentine, and quiet focus fills the air inside a converted warehouse in Peckham. Canvases lean against brick walls, faces half-formed in oil and charcoal. Around the room, artists work in silence punctuated only by the scrape of brushes and the distant hum of trains. Portraiture — that most timeless of art forms — is alive and mutating in the heart of London.
For centuries, portraits captured power: monarchs, merchants, patrons. Today, they tell different stories. In studios from Hackney to Brixton, artists are turning their gaze toward neighbours, family members, and strangers — painting the overlooked with the reverence once reserved for the elite. The result is a body of work that feels deeply human, contemporary, and profoundly London.
“A portrait isn’t about likeness,” says artist Maria Salcedo, dabbing at a canvas in her East London workspace. “It’s about empathy. When someone sits for me, I’m trying to paint what they’re not saying — the pause between thoughts.” Her recent series, Transit Faces, depicts commuters lost in reflection, their expressions shaped by fleeting moments between destinations.
Across the river, in a former textile factory in Bermondsey, a collective called Studio Lines has reimagined portraiture as collaboration. Each artist paints on another’s canvas for an hour, layering interpretations until the final image emerges — fragmented, expressive, impossible to attribute to one hand. “It’s like conversation through colour,” says member Tom Ng. “We’re painting dialogue.”
This spirit of experimentation has reached the city’s galleries too. The National Portrait Gallery’s reopening sparked renewed interest in contemporary portraiture, pairing modern works with centuries-old masterpieces. Visitors move from Hockney’s vivid outlines to a portrait of a bus driver rendered in luminous graphite — a reminder that art evolves not by abandoning tradition, but by questioning who it represents.
The new wave of artists is as diverse as the city itself. Many work across mediums — merging digital rendering, photography, and paint. Others incorporate textile or found materials, blurring lines between craft and fine art. The portrait, once bound by realism, now embraces abstraction, collage, even sound. “London is too complex for a single face,” one critic wrote recently. “Its portrait must be plural.”
Studio visits reveal an intimacy that galleries rarely show. Artists talk while painting, the rhythm of conversation shaping their strokes. One sketches her grandmother from memory, another renders a self-portrait using only recycled pigments. Each piece feels like a conversation — between past and present, self and subject, artist and city.
What ties them together is a shared belief that portraiture remains relevant precisely because it resists automation. “You can’t algorithm a soul,” laughs Salcedo, cleaning her brushes. “A face painted by hand still matters. It carries time, intention, and imperfection — the things that make us human.”
As evening light fades across South London, the studios quiet. The unfinished portraits gaze back from their easels — reminders that identity, like art, is always a work in progress. In these rooms, between brushstrokes and breath, London continues to see itself anew.