Seated Man (Drowning), 1994

Shenstone’s portraits are always technically exquisite, but the intensity and scale of her giant conté drawings push the works from depictions into emphatic expressions of personality. This particular work feels like a sliver of time captured at the extreme of human emotion and represents Shenstone at her best: showing herself there in the moment, intimately alone with her subject but opening that out into an encounter that chimes with us all. It’s of little surprise that her conté portrait of Francis Bacon, which uses a very similar approach, is part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.