How I Approach a Portrait: Notes on Self-Taught Figurative Work I'm often asked how I learned to paint and draw, and the honest answer is: mostly by doing it wrong first. I'm a self-taught artist working in oil, charcoal, pastel and pencil from County Carlow, Ireland, and almost everything I know about portraiture came from sitting with a subject, getting it wrong, and figuring out why. Why faces Figurative work and portraiture pull me in because a face is never really still.