Paul Emsley is probably the most criticized artist in all of Great Britain and maybe the world.

He has been written about in the best journalism venues in the world including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the British Art Journal; all because he did a subjectively lousy portrait of Kate Middleton.

Born in 1947 in Glasglow, Scotland and raised in South Africa, Emsley began his artistic career as a graphic designer. This was a gateway drug to harder things like painting and illustrating. Emsley began teaching design and painting first at Cape Technical College, Cape Town, then at Ruth Prowse School of Art, Cape Town, and finally the University of Stellenbosch. He taught until he couldn’t teach any more and finally decided to devote himself entirely to his art, slowly but surely becoming a famous portraitist.

He did the faces of lots of famous people like the Nobel Prize-winning British writer, V.S. Naipaul, artist, William Kentridge, Nelson Mandela and of course Kate Middleton, a portrait for which he got an extraordinary amount of heat. But Emsley just bops around, not paying any attention to his many, many, many haters. He says of his artistic process, “In my drawings I try to emphasize the singularity and silence of the form. By a careful balancing of tones I emphasise the way in which light and shade fall across the subject. By creating a settled half-light I try to transform the existence of the object from the ordinary to something more profound.” But according to the critics, he transformed the ordinary into something profoundly awful.