Jonathan Yeo is one of Britain's best contemporary portrait painters. Almost entirely self-taught, Yeo followed his natural love of painting after an illness whilst studying for a degree in Literature and Film. He studied the methods of any artists who interested him, mastering 'old fashioned' painting styles, from still life to landscapes and nudes, through to the cubism and surrealism of the twentieth century.

It is this unusual education that accounts for Yeo's remarkable versatility and experimentalism, adopting various styles and images to create his vision of a particular subject. Yeo's works vary from the classical style of his study of Dennis Hopper, the looser expressive strokes of Rupert Murdoch's portrait and the TV-image like photo-realism of Minnie Driver and George Bush, which was created from pornographic magazine cuttings. His portraits also reveal creative invention of the subject. One of several portraits of Tony Blair is painted with a Gerhard-Richter-like blur, evoking the unreality of images crafted for media consumption.

For Yeo, the photograph captures the visual information of a subject in one brief and random moment, while the painted portrait is the articulation of information accumulated over many moments, from which the painter extracts what is necessary to shape an image capturing the sitter's essence.