Kelvin Okafor

(born 1985)

Kate Moss, 2022

Footnotes

Please note twenty five percent of the proceeds from the hammer price will go to Imperial Health Charity, supporting exceptional care for children with diabetes being looked after at St Mary's Hospital in London.

Kelvin Okafor creates astonishingly detailed and hyper-realistic portraits in pencil and charcoal. Having trained at City & Guilds of London Art School and studied Fine Art at Middlesex University, Kelvin has developed a meticulous style which captures each person with extraordinary accuracy. He describes himself as a pencil artist. Each drawing takes hundreds of hours - the present portrait was completed in over 500 hours - the progress of which has been documented in photos and videos recording the stages of evolution of the drawing. Okafor immerses himself in photos, interviews and videos of each subject when embarking upon a portrait and he has captured a huge range of subjects, from Naomi Campbell to John Lennon and Mother Teresa.

As Kelvin comments: "I love to draw faces. Each face to me tells an intriguing story regardless of age, gender, race or background. In the process of putting pencil to paper, I begin by drawing in sections or stages. Since I was a child I have always created drawings this way. I visually dissect facial features - I study them and then I put them back together like pieces in a puzzle. This method of creating helps me understand expressions and also helps me appreciate the lengthy process each portrait drawing takes."

Before Kate Moss became a Supermodel and symbol of beauty in the eyes of the fashion industry, she encountered several obstacles at the very start of her career, including her height (which at 5'7 was considered too short for a model) and her look which was less polished than the celebrated standard of beauty in the 'Supermodel era' of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which celebrated statuesque height and glamour. In 1993 Kate worked on a photo shoot for British Vogue with the late revolutionary photographer Corinne Day. The images of Kate challenged the perceived notion of beauty that had been so widely lauded before, and later became instrumental in creating a new era of fashion photography in the 1990s, pioneering Grunge style.

The present image is based on a photograph of Kate taken by the photographers Luigi & Iango, for Vogue Hong Kong's second anniversary issue in 2021. Kelvin Okafor writes: "Having studied over five thousand photographic images and watched countless clips of video footage, I believed I had a sufficient amount of material to capture Kate and to depict her essence and beauty. I chose to work predominately on an image of Kate Moss taken by the esteemed photography duo Luigi & Iango. Her expression reflected a timeless natural beauty who rose to fame despite all the odds that were against her."