An artist from Washington DC who spent 22 years wrongly behind bars. A feminist painter from Canada capturing powerful women on canvas. A New York Times cover designer squirelling away in a sketchbook under a Highgate tree.
These are just snippets of the inspirational stories behind the three international artists commissioned by the Evening Standard to design exclusive portraits of the Queen for her Platinum Jubilee.
Noma Bar, Halim Flowers and Shana Wilson have all chosen entirely different interpretations of the 96-year-old monarch, but that’s what makes them special. Some show a giggly, human side; others show her coming into her full power in old age; they all depict a woman who has committed to a lifetime of duty and gained worldwide admiration along the way.
“Commissioning three artists in different locations across the world was a perfect way to celebrate this historic occasion in London and portray the Queen through very different view points,” says Jessica Landon, the Standard’s deputy art director.
“Shana Wilson’s detailed oil painting captures an intimate moment, Noma Bar brings a graphic identity to this collection of work and Halim Flowers’s abstract interpretation shows her as an iconic figurehead.”
Here are their stories.
Noma Bar
The Queen has never met Noma Bar, but you’d imagine she’d like the thought of the London-based Israeli graphic designer sitting on a blanket in Highgate Wood, drawing away in his sketchbook with an umbrella balanced above him in the branches of a tree.
For the last 16 years, this is exactly how Bar, 49, has spent the majority of his working day - even in the rain and snow - as he conjures powerful images for everyone from Google to Nike to the New York Times. It’s also exactly the position the illustrator was in when the Evening Standard’s art director called earlier this month, and asked him if he’d like to design one of three iconic portraits for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
“I started to sketch the number 70 and I realised, ‘That’s going to look like a nose and an eye’,” Bar tells me from the studio at the bottom of his garden on Archway Road in Highgate. Like the majority of the bold, block-colour animations on his 26,00 follower-strong Instagram account, it started with a series of simple lines in a sketchbook before he produced the final graphic later on his computer.
I wanted that look in her eyes to be a bit cheeky, nothing too serious - you need to be a bit cheeky after 70 years on the throne
Also echoing the majority of his works, the image quickly took on a second meaning: the bold number 70 also doubles up as the Queen’s face. “I wanted that look in her eyes to be a bit cheeky, nothing too serious - you need to be a bit cheeky, after 70 years on the throne” says Bar. He hopes the expression on her face gives her an “I did it my way” kind-of-look.
That first sketch under a tree quickly became the concept for Bar’s final design, a simple, powerful portrait that can be interpreted as the Queen smiling or even winking. Bar played around with various ages of the monarch. Some featured the white hair she’s had for most of the “golden era” of the Queen he and his graphic designer wife, Dana Bar, have lived through since coming to the UK in 2001. But eventually he settled on the “iconic silhouette” of a young Elizabeth II, as still depicted on banknotes today.
The portrait might be stripped-back compared to most depictions of the Queen, but Bar is quick to point out other details, which he deliberated over for a fortnight. “Normally my art is very bold, very colourful - but this is delicate,” he says. Rather than his usual “constructionist lines”, he drew the pearls around her neck as actual jewellery to make it more “classical”.
I ask about the colours, blue and yellow, the same as the Ukrainian flag - was that deliberate? Bar laughs and admits it wasn’t. Colours are always the part he comes to last and he knew he wanted the portrait to appear golden, like the crown, but not too golden - hence the yellow. He tried it with black and yellow but that looked too violent, so he settled on blue. That said, “maybe it’s a good thing if people are reminded of Ukraine,” he says.
For followers of Bar’s work, the blue and yellow of the Queen and the minimalist pearls around her neck will bear a striking resemblance to another member of the royal family he’s captured: Princess Diana after her fatal car crash, for the cover of the New York Times. In the piece, the Princess’ eye doubles up as a crashing car, against the silhouette of a large black camera lens.
On the day we speak, Bar is working on 15 other projects and spends most of his (rare) downtime still immersed in art, exploring exhibitions with his wife. They are yet to make plans for the Jubilee weekend because of deadlines but he doesn’t mind: that’s what happens when your hobby becomes your job. While Her Majesty addresses crowds on Saturday, Bar is likely to be exactly where he painted her: under his tree in Highgate Wood, sketchpad in hand. Happily, he wouldn’t change a thing.
Halim Flowers
Ask most people to imagine a portrait artist for the Queen’s Jubilee and they probably wouldn’t conjure Halim Flowers: a Muslim, Washington-born convicted murderer-turned-painter and rapper who spent 22 years behind bars, goes by the nickname of Superpredator and has never been to Britain.
But perhaps that’s exactly the beauty of Flowers’ admiration for the 96-year-old monarch. “Regardless of your opinion on her, I don’t believe anyone can rule for that long without love and good intention,” the poet, author and visual artist, 42, says of the Queen’s universal appeal as she approaches her Platinum Jubilee.
“I didn’t know who she was until my late twenties but I did a lot of research about her in prison: her reign, her marriage, her deep admiration for Mohammed Ali, one of my all-time favourite people... I knew I wanted to do this [painting] as soon as I was approached, I got to work in a matter of hours.”
Regardless of your opinion of her, I don’t believe anyone can rule for that long without love and good intention
Flowers wrapped up his Jubilee portrait in less than a week and though the inspiration behind the piece might have come easily, his success came rather less so. At 17, the father-of-one was wrongfully sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty as an accomplice to a felony murder in Washington DC. His 22-year incarceration was the subject of Emmy-award winning documentary ‘Thug Life in DC’ and his freedom two decades later was documented in Kim Kardashian-West’s 2020 film The Justice Project.
Flowers wrote 11 books, founded his own publishing company and took college classes while behind bars - achievements that were to be the foundation of a multi-million dollar, celebrity-endorsed artistic career. In the three years since his 2019 release, he’s done TEDx talks on criminal justice reform, been awarded multiple arts fellowships, and even collaborated with Kanye West on a spoken word performance. His work titled ‘Dichotomy of a Socially Constructed Black Man’ is listed at Sotheby’s for $10,000 and he is estimated to have sold around $1 million in works last year alone.
Today, Flowers lives with his wife Lauren McKinney and their two-year-old daughter Nala in Washington DC, clearly making up for lost time as he packs in a hectic creative schedule of photography, painting, clothing and sneaker design, poetry and spoken word performance (he has a music album currently in production).
It’s clear his talent for literature and the arts comes naturally. “I didn’t want to give her a gold crown because that would be cliché - she surpasses cliché iconography,” he tells me of his painting of the Queen, an abstract portrait inspired by his hero, late US designer Virgil Abloh, which layers an image of a young Queen on her Coronation day on top of the face of the Mona Lisa.
Graffitied on top of the Queen’s body and in the background are various messages he associates with the monarch: the number 70 to represent the Jubilee; the words “reigns” and “exceeds expectations”; “halo” spelled out in letters, rather than drawn, above her head. An equation at the heart of several of Flowers’ works, “love = mc2”, sits in the middle. “It’s a recognition of love,” he tells me. “You couldn’t sustain that regal position without strong love for yourself and the people you serve.”
Flowers might share a different religion to the Queen - he is a lifelong practicing Muslim and sports a long beard and prayer bump on his forehead - but that principle of love at the heart of their faiths is the same, he explains. Despite spending more than two decades wrongly behind bars and his criticisms of dehumanising tereotypes of Black male teens, he is forgiving, calm and relentlessly positive, wishing me a “blessed” rest of my day and raving about the positive vibrations he’s feeling after a morning of prayers and a HIIT workout.
It wasn’t necessarily always going to be this way: much of his work features the phrase “Superpredator”, a dehumanising label often attached to Black teens after former First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke of “kids called super-predators” with “no conscience” and “no empathy” when promoting her husband President Bill Clinton’s crime bill in 1996. By owning that phrase as part of his branding, Flowers hopes to reclaim it and give it new meaning.
For different reasons to him, Flowers believes the Queen was also “boxed in” because of who she was. “Never did they think a woman could do those things,” he says of her decades of achievements, which he nods to in the words “exceeds expectations” written onto his portrait.
He is flattered to be chosen as one of the Evening Standard’s Jubilee commissions and says the ultimate aim is just to make his mother smile. “As a poor Black kid from DC who was labeled a superpredator and thrown away to die in prison, I am honored to be seen as a human being with valuable ideas and talents globally,” he says. Perhaps it’s not just the Queen in this instance who’s exceeded expectations after all.
Shana Wilson
Today might be the first day Shana Wilson has shared her portrait of the Queen with the world, but the Canadian artist’s oil painting of a smiling Elizabeth II has been a permanent fixture in her own life for nearly two years.
“I nod and smile to her every day,” says Wilson, 55, who finished the canvas in 2020 and has had it hanging in her studio in Edmonton, Canada ever since. “I’ve never showed it to anyone, but it’s such a special piece to me. I’ve just been sitting on it because I couldn’t bear to let it go.”
Indeed, the Canadian figurative artist knew she wanted to paint the Queen long before being approached by the Evening Standard for a Jubilee commission. For the last 20 years, the majority of the feminist painter’s work has been focused on what she calls “tribute portraiture”: specifically, powerful portraits of women, from political figureheads to ‘normal’ women whose stories she believes should be told.
I see a woman who we’re beginning to see a more private side of - the giggles, the coyness...
Jackie Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are among those she’s painted for TIME magazine covers so far and her subjects include everyone from breast cancer survivor and scar activist, Golden Drake, to the first woman to take on the Supreme Court for sexual harassment, Anita Hill.
“I’m just a fan of strong women... obviously the Queen falls into that category,” Wilson tells me from her Edmonton home, 800 miles from where the Queen’s son Prince Charles and his wife Camilla are staying in Yellowknife as part of their Jubilee tour to Canada. “Maybe they’ll stop in for tea,” she jokes.
As a citizen of the Commonwealth and the daughter of an “avid” monarchy fan, Wilson has always felt a deep admiration for the royals, particularly the Queen herself. Her portrait is called ‘The Crown is heavy she says’ in a nod to the Queen’s decades of duty. “I feel exhausted just thinking about her life,” she says. “She’s lived through something like 14 prime ministers, I can’t even comprehend that.”
Wilson wanted her portrait to show the “staggering” sacrifice the Queen made for her country, but also a fun, human side side. Her portrait portrays the Queen in her later years, grey and wrinkled, with a wry sideways smile. “So much of public side of the Queen has had to be so serious,” says Wilson, who is represented by B Corp certified art agency MTArt. “But as she’s aged she’s been more comfortable in her own skin. I see a woman who we’re beginning to see a more private side of - the giggles, the coyness... I wanted to capture that: that there’s a woman under this crown.”
Wilson also wanted the piece to feel feminine. When her children, now 24 and 20, were young, she felt frustrated that most paintings in galleries showed powerful images of men and titillating images of women. Almost always, they were painted by men, so she hopes her feminist portraits like that of the Queen will change that: in hers, the monarch is wrinkled, unairbrushed and real - but also joyful. “It’s her in her full power,” Wilson continues. “We idolise young women but I think the most poweful time for a woman is later, when she rests easily in her skin. I see so much more vitality and strength [among women at that stage of life].”
Wilson would love to paint the Duchess of Cambridge one day and has already painted two other royals: Princess Diana during the final year before her death, and Prince Harry in a joyful piece called ‘It’s time for a lighter crown’ - a nod to his decision to leave the royal family, which Wilson supports. “These people are human with real feelings... unlike the Queen, he has the luxury of choice,” she says.
Touchingly, Wilson’s portraits show Harry looking to the left and the Queen looking to the right so it seems like they’re looking at each other when she hangs them side by side. Wilson likes the thought that they’re doing that across the Atlantic, she says. “It’s as if [they’re saying]: ‘It’s all OK’”.
For this weekend though, it’s all about the Queen on her own: as a monarch, but also a woman and a mother. Wilson’s dream is to one day hang the portrait somewhere it can be enjoyed by others, and she hopes sharing it in the pages of London’s most-read newspaper will be the start of that. “I can’t even tell you how excited I am,” she says. “It makes the last two years so worthwhile.”
