Photographing any member of the Royal Family is a nerve-wracking and significant commission, but capturing the late Queen Elizabeth’s portrait sounds like a whole other level. Artist Chris Levine found it "surreal" at first, especially when faced with her "mechanism" for meeting people.
Opening up to woman&home in our February issue, Chris - who’s perhaps best known for his exquisite 2008 portrait of Her Majesty titled Lightness of Being - explained that he initially found the monarch hard to read.
"She wasn’t giving anything away and I realised that she’d developed a mechanism where you couldn’t tell what she was thinking or feeling because she’s meeting people all the time," he shared. "I’ve never experienced it with anyone else in my life and it was really quite unnerving."
The artist found himself thinking, "'Is this happening? Am I in a dream? Is this real?' I was telling the Queen what to do and it was like I was in some kind of simulation."
As Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth was accustomed to meeting thousands of new people every year. Diplomacy was everything for the Head of State, so finding a way to ensure her innermost thoughts and feelings remained unreadable to others makes a lot of sense.
Of course, the Queen was also handling a lot at the time too, notes Chris. The artist, whose pioneering work is subject of a new book, Inner Light: The Portraiture of Chris Levine, said the first sitting took place when then-US President George Bush was staying, when "security had never been tighter" and "the then-Prince Charles was getting it in the neck in the press".
"I just don’t think it was a good day to have her portrait done," Chris continued, adding that the second sitting was where "the magic happened". He felt they "did connect a lot more" too.
The result was his critically acclaimed 2004 portrait, Equanimity. Whilst Queen Elizabeth developed her "mechanism" for meeting new people, the connection between her and Chris really came through in this portrait and in his 2008 work, Lightness of Being.
Perhaps it helped that she had become more familiar with Chris, who revealed that he and the late Queen had discussed meditation. She described gardening at Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire as a form of it for her.
"She said she was going to Balmoral the next day and really looking forward to it, and that was her meditation, gardening there. I realised that there was a real down-to-earth side of her," he declared.
Princess Eugenie has previously said that she thinks her granny was the "most happy" at Balmoral and "really, really lov[ed] the Highlands". The peaceful privacy of her Scottish home likely contributed to it being a meditative place for her, as Queen Elizabeth used it primarily as a holiday residence.
Although the depiction of her in Chris’s Lightness of Being is very far from the image we have of her wearing country attire and a headscarf at Balmoral, she looks at peace and meditative in it.
"Somehow, that resonates with a lot of people. I think there’s a spiritual dimension to that work and I think that’s what connects with people, regardless of what you think about the monarchy or whether you’re a royalist. There’s a kind of human soulful connection that touches people," the artist stated.
