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Artist Insights: Brogan Bertie

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September 30, 2026

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Brogan Bertie’s loose, intuitive portraits capture both the vulnerability and assertiveness of his sitters. In this film, he discusses his art practice, from his early, obsessive love of drawing as a child to winning Portrait Artist of the Year in 2024. He tells us how colour, texture, and form, combined with a deep curiosity about the individuals he paints, help shape the narratives within his portraits.

Contents

0:00 “Vulnerability is the point”

00:16 Introduction

0:30 “A deep, instinctual desire to draw everything that I could see”

1:49 “Their defensiveness is not a failure of vulnerability. Their defensiveness is who they are. And my job is to capture, or try to capture, who they are.”

4:09 “To do much pre-planning would almost rob the spontaneity.”

4:47 “I walked into the Open Day, and it was filled to the brim with all of these different tools for printmaking, and it smelt like ink”

6:30 “The simple interest in someone else’s story and in their life is something that has come right through – 10 years later – into how I paint people now. There … just has to be deep obsessive interest”

7:27 “I feel like the process of using oils and wrestling with them … work with each other in all of those messy, beautiful, off-key ways that human relationships can be messy”

8:30 “I don’t think illustration was my passion. It was a way of formalising drawing. And what I love about drawing is its informality.”

9:52 “It said on the advert no experience needed and no admin required. And I thought, perfect, my dream job!”

10:54 “I really love colour, I love boldness, I love an unusual colour.”

12:00 “I suppose, hunger and confidence and desire to do this. After I’d done that for a year or so, I thought, I want to be out there. I want to be in the world.”

14:16 “Transitioning has had a massive impact in how I am able to interact with the world in general, which translates very linearly to how I am able to paint”

15:12 “There is the desire, though impossible, to paint everyone I possibly could”

17:02 “The process of a portrait coming together is quite a beast”

17:49 “It’s not often that we are stared at”

19:57 “Talking is such an intrinsic part of these sittings”

21:22 “I left the pub, went to paint my entire self-portrait, which I submitted on the show, and I think that was a real sliding doors moment”

23:59 “This really alive thing, this lovely, gloopy, gorgeous stuff that makes all the oil paint very syrupy and lovely”

24:43 “I love it to be as smooth as possible, because I want that sensation of being able to draw the paint moving very easily”

25:38 “Portraiture is a form of storytelling”

26:58 “I don’t want to enter a self-protective dialogue; I hope people think I’m good at painting.
I’m not trying to prove anything about myself”

28:55 “There’s something quite satisfying and fun about the time limit in forming the energy of the painting”

29:44 “We do have to stand on our own. I think that works within a portrait”

31:08 “I created this space because my entire practice is about inviting other people in, and it feels warm, and it feels comfortable”

32:14 “Sometimes we play music together. Sometimes we’re in silence”

32:55 “The point is not to labour over someone while they have to sit in front of me and watch me doing it, because I think that’s not respectful of their time”

34:32 “The ugly duckling phase of the painting is quite a fun thing to try and navigate, but if something does go really wrong, I think there’s no harm in that”

36:03 “To me, it feels like they’re painting portraits of people to answer a question”

38:03 “Perfectionism robs us of all of the effort. I want to see the effort”

38:27 Credits

Film Extract

Vulnerability is the point; this looseness, the wonkiness, and the way it sometimes goes wrong, is the point of why I’m refining into a more traditional style of portraiture, which feels like self-protection.

Hi, I’m Brogan Betty. I’m an artist, and I’m here in the Jackson’s Studio to talk about my painting practice.

My first experience with art, when I was a kid, was this deep, instinctual desire to draw everything that I could see and to make up characters all the time. So I had pages and pages of notebooks. I used to love drawing football players that I’d made up, and I’d fill notebooks with all of these different characters.

That young preoccupation with taking whatever I was obsessed with and turning it into a drawing, whether it was a TV show or five-year-old stuff, even then, with those very early sketchbooks, was about finding a way to keep doing this forever. And at the time, I suppose that felt like a desire not to grow up, and I think that’s partly why I was so obsessed with the idea of being an illustrator. The idea of being able to keep drawing these things that I loved from storybooks or cartoons. It feels very different to where I’ve ended up as an artist.

I have the opportunity to paint every day, and to use that to dive constantly into this feeling of wanting to know other people, wanting to paint other people. That is life. Being interested in other people, that is connection. That is the pain and the desperation and the joy of trying to grasp and catch something of someone else, to try and translate them onto canvas.

The way I paint is very thick, loose, and immediate. There’s not much carefulness. I often paint strangers or people that I don’t know too well. So I think there is a pressure to make people comfortable, to invite them in and to get them to trust me, to let some barriers down so I can capture something true and real of them.

The trick is to make sure that someone is completely comfortable. What I want of them is their own body language. Their own way of moving, their mannerisms. I don’t want to think of a pose in my head and force them into it, because it’s almost prescribing an idea of them onto a painting. If it goes wonky because they’ve moved too much, that is part of the joy of the finished portrait.

If they then struggle to unmask, or it’s difficult to lower those defences. That is also okay. That defensiveness comes through in the portrait. Sometimes, if they are unable to unmask fully, their defensiveness is not a failure of vulnerability. Their defensiveness is who they are. And my job is to capture, or try to capture, who they are.

As much as I can, I try to avoid conscious decision-making. I don’t tend to do much preparation beforehand in terms of ideas for the composition or ideas for the project I want to do, because the process is so reactive to the person being in front of me. To do much pre-planning would almost rob the spontaneity.

When I was 19, I did a foundation course at Central Saint Martins. I had an amazing time; I thought it was absolutely incredible. The energy of being able to dip your toe into all these different waters suited me hugely. When you’re that age, and you don’t really know what you want to do, and you have a hunger for making things, the ability to just test everything out is invaluable.

I went on to study illustration and visual media at London College of Communication in Elephant and Castle, which I chose because of the facilities: the huge printmaking studios, screen printing, lithography. I walked into the open day, and it was filled to the brim with all these different tools that you could use for printmaking, and it smelt like ink, really deep ink. And I loved it. That’s where I found animation, really, in this quite passionate way. It’s like a door opened, and I could step through it.

The animation I was doing at the time was hand-drawn on paper, sometimes in charcoal, sometimes with paint. I remember one specific project was with Salisbury Refugee Centre about a Somali mother. I didn’t have to disguise why I was interested in her story. I think that simplicity, a genuine interest in someone else’s story and their life, is something that has carried through, ten years later, into how I paint people now. There doesn’t need to be any disguise. There just has to be deep, obsessive interest.

What I love about oils is the texture and the form. I find that the way I can play with them informs so much of the finished portrait. I love Winsor & Newton Artist Oil Paint. It feels like a kind of negotiation. It feels like a wrestling. And to want to capture something about communication and about connection, and about the feeling of wrestling with other people; of wrestling in conversation, of wrestling with how much you want relationships with other people to work, and how difficult and tricky and nuanced that can all be.

I worked as a freelancer in animation and illustration, and I enjoyed a lot of the work. But I graduated almost straight into lockdown, and I can’t really remember what I was doing with illustration. I don’t think illustration was my passion. It was a way of formalising drawing, and what I love about drawing is its informality.

I had a desk in the hallway in the flat I was living in because there wasn’t enough room, and there were no windows. And when I was doing freelance animation, I would sit at that desk for 12 or 13 hours a day doing frame-by-frame animation, and I did that for a year and a half, maybe two years, and then had to completely give it up. I’m not sure if that was because it was naturally not a fit, or because of the intensity and isolation of lockdown.

A lot of my joy in making work is about being around other people. I think I kept a few freelance jobs, but I took a break from making any art or creating anything for about a year or two years. Even after this freelance period, I had moved to Margate and had given up doing illustration or animation. I really needed a break from it and saw this ad for a job as a leatherworking studio assistant. It said in the advert that no experience was needed. And I thought, perfect, my dream job. And I went and met Hannah from Cope Studio, which was one of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me. I worked there for the next three years, just the two of us doing production for designers, bags and belts and harnesses and dog collars, and mostly, hundreds of bags.

Having been so burned out from working on my own, coming into a studio space with Hannah felt different. It was so hands-on and practical, and you could see every step of how you were helping bring something into existence.

My relationship with colour is quite intuitive. I really love colour; I love boldness. I love the outline of something being blue or the highlight of something being bright green. It’s quite reactive to who’s sitting in front of me. There seems to be a different colour scheme for each person, and maybe that offers more to someone’s character than it seems at surface level.

The colours that I can’t live without: French Ultramarine, Michael Harding Bright Green Lake, and I don’t think I could make work without Indian Yellow. These are rich, lovely, bright, quite pure colours.

I had this real break from making any work. And as someone who had drawn every single day since I was a very young child, I lost a sense of who I was. I wasn’t chasing this dream of being a career illustrator, so I had loads of time.

That space allowed me not to edit what I actually wanted to do, which was to paint people, but that felt too simple. It felt like it couldn’t be a job. So I started drawing again. That allowed me to take myself semi-seriously, seriously enough that I went to do one singular painting class because I’d never used oil paints before, and I think it was with James Hague. He is amazing. Basically, I learnt the tools: how to use medium, how to mix paint, and how it makes paint move.

I had never had the confidence before to ask someone to sit for me. I painted an ex-girlfriend, and drew her all the time, but I never could go outside of our internal sphere. That one moment of learning how oil paint works, it just opened this door in my brain, and I asked my friend Ted to sit for me. That was the first time I’d ever had someone in a room letting me paint them. From that moment, I think this hunger just opened.

Maybe, I suppose, hunger and confidence and desire to do this after I’d done that for a year or so, and I thought, I want to be out there. I want to be in the world. So I applied to Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2024 because I was like, I’m going to put myself out there, and I got on it.

Transitioning has had a massive impact on how I interact with the world in general, which translates very linearly to how I paint. And I think it’s no mistake, no error, no accident that the time, the period of time that my painting was intensifying, the period of time I felt this possibility that I could do this, and that I could really wear my interest in other people with less shame than before.

If I hadn’t transitioned, I think I would have a very different life in a lot of different ways. I think this is very translatable to loads of different experiences, not just being trans, but I felt like I was inside a dark house. The house is comfortable, and it’s okay. I think everyone has a slight distance from life. You’re looking at the outside world from behind a pane of glass, and I think that’s normal. And I transition, and the door opens, and I start painting, and the door is swinging open, and you can feel the light and the wind, and you can see other people on the other side of the door.

And I think that feeling of stepping through the door, of life coming to find me, and of it touching much closer to the skin. Because I’ve left that dark house, I will never be able to completely disentangle my relationship with painting other people and connecting to other people with the process and the skin shedding of transitioning.

For me, portraiture is a form of storytelling. I think other people’s humanity is deeply important and is, for me, the thing that makes life mean something. That ingrained empathy has completely informed how I approach portraiture.

I choose my sitters, the people I paint, quite intuitively. I let it happen naturally because I don’t really want to separate people into camps or genres. There’s almost an instinctive desire to want to paint this person, and I’m not sure why yet, but I think I will discover the thing that has drawn me to their humanity.

The process of a portrait coming together is quite a beast that I wrangle a little bit. I have some structure: this sketch in this beautiful green to get the body language down. But even in that instance, when they become comfortable talking to me on hour two, they’ll sit and lean into this, and I think, okay, well, now I have to change. I could have the painting filled with colour, and that might still shift. Rather than directing the painting with a very specific method, it’s almost like carving something out, like finding my road by digging.

In most of my portraits, there is a very intentional gaze directly at me or at the viewer. There is this idea of eye contact that wasn’t something I originally thought was going to be the through line for everything. If the point of the portrait is connection, a shorthand to achieving that is eye contact.

Talking is such an intrinsic part of these sittings. You can’t get away from someone’s specificity if you’re chatting, even if it’s not very deep, even if it’s not their life story. I have no prescriptiveness about what we talk about or about them talking in general, but leaving the space open offers a softer and more intimate, less austere approach to trying to capture someone. And maybe a more emotionally true idea of trying to capture someone’s essence rather than just their likeness.

When I did decide to apply to a Portrait Artist of the Year, I had known about it for a while, and I think I felt nervous about doing it. I’d never applied to anything before, so I kind of pushed it down the track until it was the day that the applications closed at midnight. To submit to Portrait Artist of the Year, you need to do a self-portrait, take pictures of it, and do your application. I was in the pub talking to my friends and thought, why are you doing this? Why are you just gonna let this slide by you? I left the pub, went to paint my entire self-portrait, which I submitted on the show, and I think that was a real Sliding Doors moment.

The experience was hugely encouraging. It really forced me to stand on my own feet, especially at that time for me being so green and so fresh and just really taking a chance on myself, suddenly being on TV and having people come round. They come round and ask you why you’re doing it this way, and it forces you to back yourself. I found a new depth of what I wanted to do.

After winning Portrait Artist of the Year, I had this huge confidence. So I applied to be one of the studio holders at Tracey Emin Studios in Margate, where I am now. Being in rooms with the people that I get to talk to now about art and about painting especially, something has settled within me. It went from an interest that I made smaller because I was embarrassed by it, by how much I’m obsessed with people. It feels like I’ve been given the room and the space to let that be as huge as it is.

Every portrait starts with charcoal sketching for maybe half an hour. An hour, depending on how much work I put into the composition or how much moving around. The medium that I use is lovely, gloopy, gorgeous stuff that makes all the oil paint very syrupy and lovely. It means you can basically draw with it if you want to because it’s so smooth. The whole process until the very moment it’s finished can completely change. If I want a slightly drier and stiffer feeling, I use Michael Harding Beeswax Paste to add some body to the paint, which is quite nice in contrast with the liquid and smoothness.

The working surface is crucial to my technique because I love it as smooth as possible. I want that sensation of being able to draw with the paint. If the surface is so smooth, you can wipe something away. The precarious nature of trying to capture something: nothing stays stuck until it is finished and dry. I like using a fine-grain linen canvas, and I use thick Thixotropic Alkyd Primer, which achieves that very glossy, impenetrable surface layer.

I use hoghair brushes, which I do not take very good care of. I enjoy the wrestling with tools that have been well used, well loved, and battered. A typical day in the studio tends to be: if I have a sitter, I’ll go in at 9:00 am, and I usually ask the sitter to come in for 9:30 am. I like the ritual of preparing the space for someone.

My studio space is very bright. It’s got skylights running down the whole length of it. It has, on one side, a couch, a set of shelves, a chair, and my books. I created this space because my entire practice is about inviting other people in, and it feels warm and comfortable. And then on the other side is a complete, absolute fucking mess, obviously, because it has to spill out somewhere.

At the moment, I love going larger. I love the idea of stepping into someone’s world, of someone almost being life-sized. The imitation of real connection becomes stronger, and that is something deeply satisfying to me. And simultaneously, the smaller scale things fulfil a very important purpose. I don’t want to lose that. So I keep oscillating wildly between these two joys.

I feel really connected to this tradition of contemporary portrait painters like Freud, Chantal Joffe, and Alice Neel. To me, it feels like they’re painting portraits of people to answer a question. They might not answer the question, but you can feel the desire to have a question answered.

Other artists who have had made an impression on me aren’t necessarily painters. Someone I think about is the photographer, Carrie Mae Weems. Nan Goldin as well, another photographer that I absolutely adore, which I suppose I get my appreciation for intimacy, for a desire for reality.

It doesn’t have to be good; you just have to do it. Perfectionism robs us of all of the effort. I want to see the effort. I want to see what it takes. But it doesn’t have to be really good. It has to have taken effort and love and passion. Don’t disguise what you’re interested in.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. You want to paint people, and that’s where all the interest is. And that is absolutely enough.

Further Reading

Meet Brogan Bertie, Guest Judge for Jackson’s Art Prize 2026

A Guide to Painting a Self-Portrait From Life

A Guide to Oil Painting Mediums

Artist Insights: José Jun Martínez

Shop Art Materials on jacksonsart.com

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