A Swansea teenager who started out with her mum’s old brushes in the garden shed during lockdown is taking on the Sky Arts TV show Portrait Artist of the Year.
Makenzy Beard, 19, is one of the artists from across the UK painting famous sitters against the clock in front of the judges in the new series.
She told the BBC she “wanted to give it a go” after watching the show. “It seemed like a challenge, so I thought why not,” she said.
Damian Lewis portrait and £10,000 for the Portrait Artist of the Year winner
The series winner gets a £10,000 commission to paint actor and musician Damian Lewis for the National Portrait Gallery, the BBC reports.
There’s a new judging panel this year: portrait artist Jonathan Yeo, Eva Langret, Director of EMEA at Frieze, and art historian Katy Hessel, with Stephen Mangan back as host.
Sitters across the series include Louis Theroux, Sheridan Smith, Rylan Clark and Deborah Meaden, with Heston Blumenthal sitting for the final, according to Sky Arts.
From a lockdown hobby to the Royal Academy
She took up painting in the first Covid lockdown in 2020.
By 2021, one of her first portraits, of local farmer John Tucker, had been hung at the Royal Academy’s young artists’ summer show in London.
The following year, aged 14, she was shortlisted for the young person award at the St David Awards, Wales’ national awards.
Since then she has sold paintings for thousands of pounds, some for tens of thousands, and raised more than £45,000 for charity, according to the BBC.
Early on, she told the BBC, she had little time to take stock of her own work “because I was having a lot of opinions from other people”. Now, she said, the praise is “not about my age but the work itself”.
Makenzy Beard’s second collection: animal cruelty, child poverty and mental health
She is working on a second collection of about 20 paintings, which she says reflect her “view of the world” and a growing interest in philosophy.
The subjects range from animal cruelty and child poverty to mental health, alongside some lighter takes on life’s challenges.
She has never been taught to paint, and said: “Everything I do is quite intuitive. I just do what I feel like and that’s always changing.”
Selling art is “so subjective”, she said: “You can work hard and absolutely love something and if someone else doesn’t, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.”
She can see her work becoming more political as she gets older, but said she still feels “a little bit young, too naive to project any of my opinions on these things”.
She is now looking for a gallery to partner with, to show the new collection.
Portrait Artist of the Year airs on Wednesdays at 8pm on Sky Arts, which is free on Freeview, and on the streaming service NOW, with a repeat on Thursdays at 7pm.
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