JONATHAN YEO - Celebrated Portrait Artist on the Importance of Connection & Intuitive Intelligence

How can the arts help cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What does visual art teach us about consciousness and the human condition?   

Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait with Yeo is a provisional necessity for any 21st century icon. His work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, is the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Yeo’s course on portrait painting is available now on BBC Maestro.

"I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work.

With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He mentioned that he'd been fascinated by self-portraiture as a kid, so much so that when he was doing his industrial design degree, he wrote his thesis on artists' self-portraits. Fast forward a few years, and we are all taking photos every day and learning really fast how to compose images and read images and why they've been cropped in a certain way. All these things, which were probably the preserve of artists and art historians in the past, are suddenly things that kids are thinking about because it's the way they communicate with each other. So I think that that shift is interesting."

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Images courtesy of Jonathan Yeo