As an artist, Jonathan Yeo is used to working in ancient technologies: pencil, oil paints, canvas. The Kensington-based artist has earned international acclaim for his paintings and collages of notables such as David Cameron, Malala Yousafzai and Tony Blair. But for his latest self-portrait, he reached for a new tool: Tilt Brush, the VR painting app developed by Google.

"It's an incredible 3D sketch book," says Yeo, 46. "The thing about VR that I think is really powerful is that you can draw freely in space. You don't have to shape things like stone or clay. You can make these sweeping movements, like painting. It's a hybrid of painting and sculpture, which is something that would have been impossible to do before."

To create his new kind of self-portrait, Yeo first sat for a 3D scan in the light-stage volume of Los Angeles-based scanning company OTOY; the file could then be imported into Tilt Brush. "The technology of self-portraits is basic," he says. "Before photography, you used a mirror. But to have a picture of you - a virtual life-room - that you can walk around as if you're interacting with someone else, was something new."


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But VR has one fundamental flaw: it only exists inside a headset. Yeo wanted something more tangible. So, working with the Google Cultural Institute (which develops Tilt Brush) and Gloucester-based foundry Pangolin Editions, Yeo developed a method to cast his VR brushstrokes in bronze.

The result - the first bronze sculpture created in VR - is on display at the Royal Academy as part of From Life, an exhibition celebrating portraiture. The work will sit alongside a series of new paintings by Yeo which explore the impact of technology on the form. "When I was at art school, portrait painting was seen as anachronistic," Yeo says. "A side effect of technology is that we've become much more adept at reading portrait images. We expect photographs to be manipulated. We don't take any digital image at face value." In such an ephemeral world, he says, sculpture feels like a riposte, a refuge. "To make something in one of the oldest art forms known to man - 6,000 years old… there's something permanent about it."

From Life runs at the Royal Academy until March 2018.