Brogues gallery

I spend most of my time drawing politicians, trying to work out what makes them distinctive. The eyes, the expression, their mood: it’s all about finding people’s peculiarities and accentuating them. When I started, I’d focus on the face. Everything else was an afterthought. It wasn’t until I came across a drawing by the Norwegian cartoonist Finn Graff – a cartoon of Helmut Kohl, I think – that I realised what I had been missing. How much you can tell from someone’s shoes.

I didn’t discover this, so much as rediscover it. When I was a teenager, I worked in a shoe shop in my home town of Arendal, Norway. I used to challenge myself to identify the right shoe for a customer the moment they walked in. It helped that they usually wore some already, of course, because people don’t tend to stray too far from previous choices. But I could usually tell from the outset what sort of person they were, and whether to focus my sell on comfort, style, quality or price. My challenge was to get the customer to buy the first shoe I suggested.

Middle-aged men who had worn their brogues to destruction were likely to hate the process of shoe shopping. Simply by pointing out that the most expensive, durable brands would be instantly as comfortable as their worn-out wrecks and probably save them from having to come back for a while, they would often leave with more than one pair. Norwegians like to say, ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes’, so I would preach about the wonder of Gore-Tex to anyone entering the shop in an all-weather jacket. Interesting laces could convince a reluctant teenager out of his trainers and into something more stylish, much to the appreciation of the parent in tow.