'The Tailor' by Lubaina Himid
This audio clip describes The Tailor by Lubaina Himid (b. 1954).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, Lubaina Himid's portrait of a tailor.
Full audio description text
This portrait of a tailor measures 183 centimetres tall and just over a metre wide. In acrylic paint on paper, it features a black man, nearly life-sized. Of any age between 30 and 50, he appears almost flat, as if cut from cloth. He's standing against a pale grey wall, that's decorated with darker grey shapes – some repeated – perhaps pattern pieces. He stands facing us on a carpet patterned with geometric shapes – mid-blue diamonds edged with pink and black, making them stand out. The man's almond-shaped eyes look straight out with a direct gaze, although his head is tilted with slight shyness to one side. He has almost no hair. His shoulders are broad and his arms hang straight down.
He wears a crisp dark blue jacket with matching jeans. Blue and yellow threads stream from needles pinned to the collar of the jacket which is worn over a sky-blue t-shirt. The jacket's front panel has a geometric, checkerboard design of darker and lighter blue squares inset with orange. Stitched onto it are two breast pockets made of African prints. The one to the left has five canoe shapes with white dots set vertically against pale blue and white bands. They could be seed pods or possibly shields. The pocket to the right has three blue shapes like fish, outlined in black against a white background with black dots. A red canvas belt is loosely fastened about the tailor's hips, and just below the belt, a third patch pocket is attached to the left leg of his jeans.
The thumb of his left hand is hooked into this pocket which is the same sky-blue colour as his t-shirt. Threaded into it are pins and needles, and sticking up from it are the orange handles of dressmaker's scissors. In his other hand, the tailor clasps a T-square ruler, used for drawing straight lines on cloth.
The cuff of the jacket above this hand is folded back, showing three pearl buttons and a long pleated yellow cuff that's possibly silk. The opposite cuff is neatly folded back in line with the sleeve and fastened by a single light blue button. The man's fingers, nails neatly trimmed, extend down over the pocket directing our gaze towards the hem of his jeans – their blue leopard-print underside brushing the top of his red suede shoes. These are lace-up, but the laces don't match: those of his right shoe are thin and black, the left are thicker and brown. The right shoe pokes into a mysterious domed structure of orange wire that sits on the carpet.
The artist's signature, 'Lubaina Himid', and the year 2010 are written very small in black where the wall meets the carpet, by the tailor's right leg.
