Gareth Reid is a painter and portraitist, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1974 and now lives and works in Glasgow. Winner of Sky Arts' television competition Portrait Artist of the Year in 2017, he was recently announced as the Sky Arts' 'Portrait Artist of the Decade'.

Trained at the University of Ulster, Glasgow School of Art and Florence Academy of Art, Gareth has held numerous one-person exhibitions in Glasgow, Dublin and Northern Ireland. He is a prize-winner at the BP Portrait Award and the Royal Ulster Academy, and his work is in collections including the National Gallery of Ireland, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ralph Lauren and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Prince Charles of Wales (now Charles III)

Gareth's 2019 portrait of Charles III is in the collection of Historic Royal Palaces at Hillsborough Castle. The National Portrait Gallery exhibited the portrait of Dame Judi Dench, for which Gareth was awarded Sky Arts' 'Portrait Artist of the Decade'.

Dickon Hall, Art UK: Congratulations on winning 'Portrait Artist of the Decade'. You won Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Year in 2017 – how has it changed your working life as an artist during those years?

Gareth Reid: Thank you. It made a huge difference to me in terms of visibility. Sky Arts broadcast the show in North America and Australia and it was repeated often in UK and Ireland so it was like an unexpected free ad for my work that kept running to a growing audience. But most of all, because of the popularity of the sitter, Graham Norton, my work has become well known in Ireland via the National Gallery of Ireland.

People came to be aware of my work and therefore invitations to exhibit and commissions from all over the world increased. The longlists that I was on became shortlists, and this has, in turn, slowly converted into multiple high-profile portraits over the past few years. I stopped teaching to keep up with the portraiture commissions for the last five years but I feel like it's now time to get some balance back with exhibiting my work again.

Dickon: I know portraiture has been an integral part of your work since you began to exhibit regularly in the late 1990s, with paintings and drawings of your own family as well as other sitters featuring in many exhibitions. Has your approach to a portrait always been consistent with your approach to a different subject or are they very different aspects of your art?

Gareth: I would say that they are quite different purely because of the constraints inherent in the former but I try to keep them as close as possible. I've always used figures in my work but if your subjects are commissioned you can't take liberties with how you represent them. You don't quite have the same freedom in terms of colour or arrangement as you would if you didn't have someone else's expectations to meet. But generally, there are the same core concerns that apply: colour, balance, composition, the all-important abstract elements that make any good picture. As well as trying to convey some kind of palpable presence and other universal themes.

Dickon: You've worked as a professional artist for over 25 years. How do you now divide your time between portraits and your other paintings, and has it been difficult to keep studio time for other works when you are in such demand as a portraitist?

Gareth: It's been mind-bogglingly close to 30 years now… Since Portrait Artist of the Year 2017 aired, about 95 per cent of my output has been portraiture drawings and paintings. It meant that I was pretty much in the studio all the time, having stopped weekly teaching. I think I will always produce portraits but I aim to increase my exhibition work and get more balance there. It's a completely different head space, much more instinctive and free, thinking purely on how to make a painting work and taking any steps necessary to achieve that goal as opposed to working collaboratively with a commissioner or the subject.

Dickon: Several of your portraits are on public display, for example in the National Gallery of Ireland and Hillsborough Castle; is it ever frustrating when a portrait you are particularly pleased with goes into a private or corporate collection and is never exhibited or seen widely?

Gareth: Yes, definitely. Luckily I'm quite proud of the ones hanging in public – I can't imagine how debilitating it would be if I hated them. But yes, there are a few that I'm very pleased with which will only ever be seen by friends and family. I suppose social media helps a wee bit with this but seeing them in pictures is never the same as seeing them in the flesh.

Lola Reid at the National Portrait Gallery, with the BP Portrait Prize exhibition banner

Dickon: Your portrait of your daughter Lola, Northern Bather, was used to advertise the BP Portrait Prize exhibition. How did it feel to see a painting with such a personal background on a huge banner outside the National Portrait Gallery?

Gareth: It was indeed quite strange and a massive thrill for both of us but there's definitely a separation in pictures like that one where it's less of a portrait of her, Lola, and more a painting of a girl, who happens to be my daughter, 'acting' in it. That makes pictures like them, where my daughters appear, a bit less personal. Only a bit though! I'm still very attached to those particular ones.

Dickon: You clearly feel at ease working in charcoal. What qualities does it have that interest you and that are most effective in portraits and other works?

Gareth: Drawing has always been a major part of what I do, so that – and the simpler (in a way), monochromatic nature of charcoal – has provided a feeling of comparative comfort. Especially the way I work now allows me to work really sculpturally, carving out the forms to a soft subtlety that helps objects and people sit within space – which gives that three-dimensional feeling. Sometimes you can go a bit deeper than with paint, purely because of the constraints.

Dickon: I know you have returned recently to working on a painting that is particularly significant for you, but would also resonate strongly with a lot of people: a portrait of Kelly Gallagher MBE, the Northern Irish skier who won Britain's first-ever Winter Paralympic gold medal in 2014.

Gareth Reid working on his portrait of Kelly Gallagher

Gareth: First-ever gold medal by any British skier ever, in fact! Kelly's late father Pádraig and my own Dad were best friends, so the Gallaghers were close to our family. We had followed Kelly's ski racing career and were naturally extremely proud of her achievement of winning the super giant slalom gold medal at the Sochi Winter Paralympics.

I wanted to mark it by painting her portrait as I thought she'd make a great subject. I also felt like, if it was good enough, it should be in a collection because of what Kelly represents. It's a portrait I've almost completed a few times which has gone through numerous iterations but never quite got there. Recently, after chatting to Kelly about the shocking fact that this year is the tenth anniversary of her medal, I looked at it in my studio with fresh eyes and restarted the process. My plan is to have it finished later this year and show it somewhere, as yet undecided.

Dickon Hall, art historian and Art UK Commissioning Editor (Northern Ireland)

Visit Gareth Reid's website to learn more about the artist