Artist Daphne Todd's portrait of mother after death makes BP prize shortlist

A painting shortlisted for the UK's most important prize for portraiture depicts the artist's 100-year-old mother shortly after her death.

The work, one of three in the running for the £25,000 BP Portrait award, was made at an undertaker's premises over three days, just after Annie Mary Todd had died in hospital.

The artist, 63-year-old Daphne Todd, had painted her mother several times during her lifetime, and they had agreed that she could paint her after her death.

"I talked things through with the undertaker, and they kindly gave me the time and space to paint the portrait. She was on a trolley, raised up on pillows, as I remember last seeing her in hospital."

She added: "For me it was a form of digesting facts ... it was very therapeutic spending that amount of time making the work; in fact, though I miss my mother very much, I didn't seem to do any other sort of grieving."

Studying her mother so deeply after her death "was a form of finding out, of analysis". "People do change and move after death. They sink into themselves; they continue on their way." She had worked on the piece until she began to "feel uncomfortable", she added.

The other two shortlisted artists are 38-year-old American David Eichenberg, for Tim II; and the British artist Michael Gaskell, 47, for Harry.

Eichenberg's picture shows his friend, the sculptor Timothy A Stover, in his workplace beneath the artist's studio in Toledo, Ohio. In the manner of Holbein, each object in the work represents an aspect of the sitter.

Nottingham-based Gaskell, last year's runner-up, has produced an intense portrait of a young man whom he saw in the street on a shopping trip and persuaded to sit for him.

Todd – who, in 1994, became the first woman president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters – said that the impulse to paint her mother, who had lived with her for the last 14 years of her life, came partly from the memory of her feelings when her father died suddenly at the age of 62. At the time she had been abroad, painting landscapes. "When I got back the undertakers had dealt with him. He was completely unrecognisable with a grey little face. It was very difficult to come to terms with his death; he had never been ill."

【编辑：黄辉】