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BP Portrait Award 2013. Second prize awarded for 'The Uncertain Time', oil on canvas, 1676mm x 2438mm. Displayed at the National Portrait Gallery, London (20 June - 15 September 2013); Aberdeen Art Gallery (2 November 2013 – 1 February 2014); and Wolverhampton Art Gallery (3 March – 14 June 2014)

‘The Uncertain Time’ was one of two paintings selected for the BP Portrait Award 2013 by a jury that included Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery; David Dawson, painter/photographer; Victoria Pomery, Director Turner Contemporary, Margate; Ali Smith, author; Sarah Howgate, Contemporary Curator NPG, and Des Violaris, Director UK Arts & Culture BP. Almost 2,000 entries from 75 different counties were considered, with the exhibition selection of 55 made to showcase ‘the most outstanding and innovative portraits from around the world’. The National Portrait Gallery anticipate the London exhibition will be seen by ¼ million people.

Painted over three years, this portrait incorporates three life size figures of adolescents. The painting is the culmination of an ongoing engagement aimed at testing the viability and relevance of figurative painting in relation to a practice and discourse increasingly dominated by digital media. The picture developed slowly from its original inception: as the subjects themselves changed, so the picture evolved to accommodate those changes. The key stages were documented and studies and drawings also attest to the painting as a site of flux and transformation.

Painted portraits are the distillation of hundreds of moments of scrutiny over a period of time. The relationship between the immediacy of the painted mark and its surface, with the more contemplative engagement of the elements that constitute markers for recognition and separateness of identities, provide the tension in the image. Devane is working in this realm, identified by Richard Brilliant, which is evident in renewed interest in the work of Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, David Hockney, Eric Fischl and Odd Nerdrum. Increasing awareness of how portraiture reflects biological drivers for facial recognition appears to be a factor in its resurgence as a genre of continuing interest within painting, despite the immediacy of new forms of image capture.