Jonathan Yeo: The artist reflects on the painting of Cara Delevingne and Taron Egerton

Source image, Jonathan Yeo

By Steven McIntoshEntertainment reporter

Artist Jonathan Yeo is one of the UK's best-known portrait painters - an art form, he says, which is more important than ever in an era where tens of millions of selfies are captured every day.

Yeo is best known for his portraits of figures from the world of entertainment, royalty, politics and activism. - among them Sir David Attenborough, Idris Elba, Nicole Kidman, Malala Yousafzai, Helena Bonham Carter and Sienna Miller.

Her other subjects include former US President George W Bush. and former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair, as well as the former Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Camilla, and the late Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Phillip.

A painted painting According to Yeo, a portrait has the ability to encapsulate more aspects of a sitter's personality than an ordinary photograph.

"A photo is a frozen moment," Yeo told the BBC. News. "What you get when you paint a portrait is a little bit of time that passes. When you paint a picture, you work on one part at a different time than the other. So instead of one static image, you I captured a lot of different moments.

"Your relationship with the subject evolves as you get to know it," he continues . "You see them on different days, and people behave differently, they look different on different days, so you can bring in different elements of their personality, mixed in interesting ways. And you see them with two eyes rather than with a camera, which sees them with one."