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Now listen again while you check the audio transcription. Then check the answers below.

INTERVIEWER: Good evening. I have in the studio with me today the distinguished still-life and portrait artist, Liam Carolan. Liam, when did you first realise you had artistic talent? LIAM CAROLAN: Well, it was always impressed upon me when I was young, because both my parents were artistic, the family shall we say. My father taught in an art school and was also a very good portrait painter, though he did them really just out of interest - not to earn a living that way. He had a fair number of exhibitions in London before the war, but with abstract paintings, and so he was quite avant-garde for the time. He even had one with Picasso. INTERVIEWER: So did you always have it in mind to be a professional artist? LIAM CAROLAN: Well, no, I wouldn't say... I think my experience in art college made me sceptical of that idea and I was rather disillusioned for quite a long time and I didn't do very much in the way of art after leaving college. The training that I had wasn't really directed towards the sort of things I'm doing now. In those days students were encouraged towards more cerebral attitudes to art and what I do is, some people would say, obsolete or even perhaps naive, but I'm still painting figurative paintings today. INTERVIEWER: Why would people prefer a painted portrait to a photograph of themselves? LIAM CAROLAN: I think generally most people feel that if you have something made by hand rather than by a machine and if it's a design feature in the house, then a portrait hanging on the wall is much better to live with, although people who like living in very modern environments might prefer to have a photograph hanging on the wall. But whether it's a portrait or a landscape, I think most people if you asked, 'Do you prefer a photograph or a painting?', I think most people would say a painting. INTERVIEWER: Do you tend to paint your subjects from life or from photos? LIAM CAROLAN: Well, I used to paint from photos but now I tell people I'd prefer not to. But interestingly, when I have done so the reaction has been, 'I thought that was a photograph!' In other words the painting looks like the photo, so I think a painting from life gives life to the painting and why that's the case is for many reasons to do with your contact with the person that's in front of you, the tension that's created when you're dealing with an individual one to one. There's a nervousness and an adrenalin that goes into that painting which is sparked off by that interaction. It's not something you think about when you're in the process of doing it, but the technique is completely different when you're painting someone as a three-dimensional object. INTERVIEWER: Mmm. How do you go about capturing the personality of your sitters? LIAM CAROLAN: I think just to try and paint what you see in front of you, which is a difficult enough task, is sufficient. And I think that if you do that, then something about the person will come through without you forcing it. And often I think perceptions of the qualities of a sitter or a subject are things that are noticed by the observer of a portrait rather than things produced by the painter. I think there's something about a painted portrait as opposed to a photograph which draws the viewer in and then they see things about the subject that they'd never noticed before. INTERVIEWER: You've done a number of self-portraits, haven't you? Why did you do those? LIAM CAROLAN: Really just for practice. If I haven't got a model around, then I'm left with myself. Actually, I've usually been dissatisfied with the results. It's not necessarily more difficult than doing other people, but there is a problem of getting the scale. I always stand almost next to the sitter when I'm doing an oil painting to get it life size and if you're looking in a mirror the image that you see is always smaller. I've got one self-portrait that I like and I think that most people think that I look rather ferocious. But from a technical point of view I think that it's good, it isn't, I think, a particularly flattering one in fact.