What makes a good portrait? You may assume that it all depends on physical likeness. “Well, it looks very like you,” people will say. But actually, the more you think about it, superficial veracity is just the first of any number of far more important things. We are not merely an assemblage of physical accoutrements: of eye colours and lip shapes and hair styles and nose lengths. Our sense of individuality and how it slots into society are about far more than that. We are made up of attitudes and moods, sets of values and tastes. These can’t easily be transcribed. But they can be expressed. And that is why earlier this year the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) launched an art competition open to anyone between the ages of 11 and 19.

The EHRC asked entrants to think about what being a young person in today’s Britain means: to consider what matters to them, which issues affect them, how they define themselves, and how they feel themselves to be treated by society as a whole. The commission was searching for a more truthful understanding of how young people orientate themselves amid what is too often described as an increasingly fractured and hostile world.

The panel of 13 judges spanned the world of arts, education and media. They included Alison Lapper, the artist whose huge marble portrait by Marc Quinn dominated the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth; Sandy Nairne, the director of the National Portrait Gallery; and William Packer, the art critic who is also a painter. The response was impressive. There were 1,639 entries.

Together they conjure a wonderfully broad picture of a lively, highly engaged, multifaceted and extremely talented group of people who don’t like the stereotypical labels that they feel are too often stuck on them. The range of vision and reference was extraordinary. Here were youngsters who presented themselves as anything from an Archimoldo-style assemblage of vegetables through a Spiderman cartoon character to a face on a postage stamp. For every tangle-tressed teenager who sees herself as some soft-focus fashion model there is another who is keen for the world to know that they are lurking alone and misunderstood in their rooms. But, broadly speaking, this was an outreaching group: compassionate, thoughtful and articulate.

The youngsters were concerned about such issues as neglect of the elderly, domestic violence and global warming. They define themselves less by their skin colour or religion than by their individuality as expressed in the clothes that they wear or their musical tastes. They are interested in the technology that surrounds them, aware of the pressure that the media puts on them and so eager to speak out that many of the images are collaged with scraps of cut-out texts.

Perhaps most salient of all was the fact that this was an optimistic bunch. They seem to feel lucky to have landed up in this world as members of British society, of a country where choices and freedoms abound.

www.equalityhumanrights.com/art

Fungai Mutezo, 17

Fungai is a studying for his A levels at Caldervale High in Airdrie, Scotland. He came to Britain only five years ago from Zimbabwe, when his father got a job. He misses his home country and his extended family and would go to visit them often if it was more easily affordable. Using acrylic on card, he paints not just a technically talented but a strikingly honest and intimate portrait of himself in a contemplative mood. “In a way, when I first came to Britain,” he says “it was really quite hard to understand the culture. When I was painting I would think of home. That’s why I put that pattern at the back. It’s an African pattern that’s like the backdrop to my life. I think that, with time, I have bonded with life in Britain, but I would love to go back to Zimbabwe. I am hoping that one day I will be able to take all the skills I am learning here and make them into something useful, to give something back to the society that has made me who I am today.”

Stephanie Winn, 17

Stephanie has just finished at Gumley House Convent School in Hounslow, West London. She is going on to study at the Camberwell School of Art, South London. Her acrylic portrait of her grandmother is so vivid that the spectator, even without knowing her, can feel immediately how much she matters. Painting with the attention to detail that she admires in such artists as David Hockney and Lucian Freud, Stephanie conjures a vital sense of personality. This picture has a wonderful unposed freshness. Her grandmother, a former runner who won medals for Britain, didn’t want the slippers, but “she always wears them, so I said they had to go in”, Stephanie says. She presents her sitter with an almost girlish animation. “I was talking to her all the time and we were engrossed in conversation.” Old people should not be dismissed as irrelevant, says Stephanie, who started this portrait after seeing a girl on a bus almost push over an old lady as she barged by. “I wanted to celebrate how happy my grandmother is and how beautiful. I wanted to paint her spirit and character.” This spirit shines from the portrait. “My grandmother is 80 and fitter than me. I feel it is my duty to show how much life she has.”

Georgia Evangelou, 11

Georgia is the youngest of the three winners. She comes from Wynchmore Hill, North London and goes to St Paul’s Primary School. Her father is a talented amateur artist and she has clearly inherited some of his skill. Her Self in Still Water was her first attempt at oil. She took the picture using her mobile phone then printed it out, squared it up and transferred it on to the canvas. This is a delightfully evocative and very sophisticated piece of work. Georgia, despite the fact that she often chatters away as she paints, perfectly captures that peaceful abstracted mood that we all recognise at the end of the day, when we get in the bath and let the water around us take the weight off our feet and dissolve our worries away. The bliss of relaxation spreads in a slow smile across her face as she lies back and lets her mind wonder, her face framed by the lovely floating masses of her hair. “This feeling of a tranquility is a real privilege,” Georgia says. “In other countries, people would not even have enough water to do this. Sometimes they don’t even have enough water to drink. But here in Britain we have water for leisure. We are very lucky.”

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