Portraits

I have a 'thing' for portraits.  It may be because portraits are so challenging.  If you don't get the detail correct, down to fractions of a millimetre, the likeness just isn't there.  Portraiture is the challenge of capturing the essence of what makes someone who they are, this holds true whether you believe in the existence of the soul or not.  Though the challenge of capturing a likeness is fleeting, it is something tangible...measurable, it is within reach.  

With the ambiguity attached to the value of art these days, the comparatively clear cut nature of portraiture makes it a safe haven for me; a dark cave that I can crawl into when I'm feeling fragile, when the integrity of everything else I do seems under attack.

Self-portrait, oil on panel.

I enjoy making portraits from life.  The challenge of drawing from life compounds the difficulty of maintaining a likeness, after all your subject is moving and breathing!  I enjoy that in front of your model, drawing and painting, or sculpture, becomes a social experience...after all art can be so lonely and in that sense even a little masochistic!  It's that social experience that can help gain an insight into the model's personality, which in turn can be injected into the artwork.


Of course, all this isn't to dismiss making art with the aid of a camera!  Working from a photograph can help to get a likeness, it can help to tune your eye into noticing the smallest of details.  It is also incredibly convenient.  However, those benefits come with problems.  The eye is no longer the eye of the artist, the artist is mechanical or digital.  I think it's because of this disconnect between the model and the artist that helps us to become more objective when drawing from a photo.


The complexities involved in trying to make a viewer engage with a portrait, to make it such as they could almost commune with that 'person', are what makes portraiture so compelling for me.  The minutia of likeness does not necessarily mean you have a good portrait, beyond likeness is the personality...what some would call the soul.  This can only be grasped through an intuition and only when the artist has communicated with the model, until then the portrait remains a shallow interpretation and without any graphological reference that can easily relate to the personality of the sitter.


Every week I work with adults who have learning difficulties.  I help them to make art.  From time to time I make sketches of them as they work.  In some cases I can produce a likeness that I am happy with from only seconds of drawing, I think this is because with some people, their personality is etched onto their faces!  This isn't to say that I find people who are difficult to draw conceited, simply that they have more delicate features.  For this reason, I find men often easier to draw from than women! Older people are easier for me to draw, too.

Pencil sketch on copy paper.

The above drawing was done on scrap paper while I was running a class at an adult resource centre.  It's quite simply drawn, taking up to or just over a minute or so to complete.  No measuring took place to map out the proportions of the figure.  Note, he is holding the brush in an odd way,  he was actually doing that!  If the portrait was of a young woman or girl,  I don't think I would have been able to achieve a likeness within that time because of the delicacy of feminine features, I would have to refine the proportions repeatedly by measuring.  In a face with more 'character', where the primary features are larger, I find that the distance between those features does not matter quite as much to achieve a likeness.  I need to be careful not to step into the realm of caricature sometimes though!

Pencil drawing on scrap paper, before handing the drawing to the service user for him to work with.

Again, the above drawing was completed on scrap paper, taking a few minutes.  Once I was happy with the drawing I gave it over to the subject for him to work with.  I'm always interested in the model somehow imprinting their identity onto the work.  I particularly like how the subject's bold, incised, marks sit right over the top of mine, even though they exist in the same space.

Drawing with felt tip pen additions.

In this particular instance, I gave my sitter a different media to work on the drawing with, felt pen.  I really like how she worked around my drawing, showing it some respect.  Unlike the last drawing, where the service user drew right over the top of my work.  It doesn't bother me either way, if my work is destroyed by the model, I find the behaviour of their 'signature marks' really compelling in how they reveal something of their personality, certainly more than I could alone.  


I am interested in revealing something of the person modelling for a portrait.  Sometimes I find that difficult to do, and often I can 'overthink it', preventing me from making work!  It would be far easier to just do the portrait and let it speak for itself, but I have a habit of complicating things!


When I was an undergraduate, I deliberately worked from photographs to achieve the 'conceptual' aim of imbuing the final portrait with some form of personal history relating to the person I was drawing.  There are benefits from working from a photograph.  A photograph can help distance the artist from the personality of the sitter, making it easier to achieve a likeness.  However, I often feel this can bleach the character out of the work.  As an artist, your viewer ends up looking at your interpretation of a photograph, rather than an interpretation of a personality. 


I deliberately worked from photographs in order to focus on expressive mark making, rather than being distracted by personality.  In this way, I wanted my drawing and marks to be more visible.  I took small passport sized photos and enlarged them manually, using willow charcoal, to A1 in size, thereby making it easier for me to work losely.  I wanted the viewer to somehow glean a little of my personality from the marks that I made.  If the portrait was tightly or photographically rendered, it would be difficult to seperate the work from any other photorealist drawing or painting. 


After completing my drawing, I displayed it alongside some sort of artifact relating to the history of the person presented in the portrait.

Apocryphal, A1 charcoal drawing on Fabriano paper, displayed with handwriting sample and graphological analysis.

The 'artifact' I used for the above drawing was a sample of handwriting that I had the subject write.  I asked her to note a few paragraphs that somehow described her as a person.  Interestingly, she chose to write an exerpt from "Desiderada".  I then had the writing professionally analysed by a graphologist to present the viewer with a deeper insight into the person drawn.

Token, A1 charcoal drawing on Fabriano paper, handwritten letter notifying recipient of the death of a soldier, wooden porthole looking onto a wall drawing.

Fashion Statement, A1 charcoal drawing on Fabriano paper, fox 'scarf' with imitation label sewn on.

In these portraits, I deliberately I took something out of them by using a photograph to draw them from.  The subjects were young in the photos, vital.  Different people than how they exist today.  I then tried to put that distant element of personality back into the work by presenting a component of the subjects' life alongside the drawing, this took the form of an object that meant/means something to them. 


The following drawings are done from life.  You might be able to tell the difference from those completed from photos.  The first two are from the same model, even though you might be led to believe there are from two different models!  The difference between the two drawings is in part due to a change in media, pencil over pastel.  When working from life, the demeanor and mood of the model can change from sitting to sitting.  In fact, it's often a good idea to let the model relax into a pose for a few minutes before drawing.  This change in mood could also contribute to a change in likeness.  Becoming familiar with a model's personality also alters the way you see them and can also contribute to the challenges of working from life by altering your interpretation of the way they look.


I asked this particular model, Gemma, to sit for me because of her particularly striking features.  I knew I would have a hard time drawing her; she has very delicate eyes and subtle jawline in contrast to strong cheekbones and dynamic angles in the facial features.  I would like to complete a painting with her as the main character.  I've got a few ideas as to what form that might take, but nothing concrete yet.

First drawing of Gemma, I think the distance of the philtrum- between the lips and the nose is a little too long, the cheekbone may also be too sharp.  Sometimes, you can only see those things after being away from a drawing for a while.

Sometimes, when drawing from life, you can get to close to the work.  I don't mean physically close.  I mean that your mistakes can often be difficult to see.  At this stage, take a break and look at the piece in a mirror.  If you have time, take a photo of the drawing or painting and flip it, rotate it and zoom in and out with photoshop or another computer program; it can help to see your mistakes by distancing yourself from the work.


My next drawing of Gemma was done with pastel on a toned ground.  The stylization wasn't really deliberate.  I think it was a result of feeling more relaxed with her as a model and also with pastel  being a more liberating medium.  The angle of her head is slightly different to the last pose, with more of the cheekbone visible. 

Pastel on toned paper.

When drawing a long pose, I tend to map out the features as best I can, lightly at first, after sketching in the basic angle of the head.  This process is easier if the person has more obvious, less delicate features.  More time can then be spent refining the details, adding tone and resolution to the picture as a whole.

Alex.  Long pose drawing.  Graphite on paper.

One of the things I admire, particularly in painting, is when a likeness is captured in as few brush strokes as possible.  That, to me, takes more skill than an almost photographically rendered portrait done with thousands of tiny brush strokes.  For this reason, when I'm painting a portrait, I tend to paint them Alla Prima style.  That is, I paint them opaquely and spontaneously.  It has been quite some time since I painted a portrait in the imprimatura style, essentially layers of semi-transparent paint in the fat over lean manner, painted over a toned ground. I tend to reserve the tighter painting style of imprimatura for when I am attempting to illustrate an idea or concept.

Alla Prima portrait study. Oil on Canvas.

For all the reasons mentioned, I love the challenge of painting a good portrait.  Sometimes I yearn to paint a photorealistic portrait, in the imprimatura fashion, almost to prove to myself that I can.  Perhaps that's what I'll do for the painting of Gemma.  Of course, then I wonder...why paint it like that?  What is that manner of painting adding to the concept of the portrait?


I want to work on a portrait for next year.  I need to think on it less, and just paint!