I have done very few self portrait in my career: never thought that my face was so interesting. However, while researching portraits, I looked at various artists’ self portraits and was encouraged to do one of myself. Not sure how good a likeness this is, but I feel that it is a good drawing.
These portraits are again from a photo and from a live sitting (the one on the left from a photo) of a friend who was visiting from Berlin. The one done from life is a better drawing capturing as it does a certain intelligence and characteristic expression of the sitter. However, as Mirka remarked (and she was right!) the drawing makes the width of her face too narrow.
Interestingly, it took me three tries to get close to a resemblance when working from the photo. Mirka’s face is asymmetrical ( actually all of our faces are, but some people are more asymmetrical than others), which I got in the sketch, but struggled with when using the photo. And again, as a drawing, the one done from the photo has an overworked quality which I don’t like.
I’m going to do one or two more drawings of Mirka, this time working from the drawings rather than the photo. Let’s see what happens!
I am going to take a suggestion from Seth Godin and start a daily blog of my portraiture work. I am practicing doing portraits in order to become as skilled as possible so that I can work with live models as well as photos. Also, doing this practice in public will keep me honest and on task!
Today’s drawing is of my neighbor Chris with his very ironically named cat, Bonchat sitting on our balcony in late summer. This portrait got to the heart of their relationship: undemonstrative cat, very loving master!
Although I did this from a photo, I worked to get some of the more interesting and less definitive marks of unmediated seeing. It is also fun to do portraits of friends and family that I know well. The portrait is more likely to be an authentic representation of the person.
More on the difference between working from life and from photos tomorrow!
“For the image of the sitter on the artist’s retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind chock full of other images; and is transferred-Heaven knows how changed already-by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and juxtaposition of light and shade belonging not merely to the artist himself, but to the artist’s whole school…and, in truth, a portrait gives the sitter’s temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.” from Vernon Lee’s Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (1904)
Vernon Lee was the nom de plume of Violet Paget, a good friend of John Singer Sargent, who painted a lovely portrait of her that can be found online. She was an art historian, feminist, and pacifist (1856-1935).
Gilles Deleuze also noted, in his wonderful book on Francis Bacon, that the problem with beginning a painting is not that the canvas is blank, but that it is too full of everything that the artist has seen, which must be let go to begin a new piece.
I did a portrait sketch of Mirka, a friend visiting from Berlin; and she asked me why I paint. It has taken me a while to articulate why I paint, but I believe that I do it in order to witness, just to witness the world and the life we live. It is not to pontificate or criticize or propagandize, but to simply record what is not being seen.
This may seem to be redundant: in the age of the iPhone, everything must be recorded, mustn’t it? But the reality is that much is ignored: the musicians and the homeless in the street; the beauty of weeds; the majesty of the trees that tower over our neighborhoods. We don’t really see what the city looks like as a whole, as we experience it in disjunctive pieces: destinations like our home or shops; or liminal spaces like bus interiors and metro stations; or our personal home. We also rarely look for any length of time at anything: neither people’s faces, nor their bodies, nor Nature in any of her manifestations in the city (nor, for that matter, paintings!) .
So there are many subjects that a figurative painter such as myself has available to her; and for a viewer, the focus of a painter’s work appears to be the subject: peonies, portraits, landscapes. But for me, as for many painters I believe, the subject is just one aspect of the painting, just the hook on which equally important concerns are hung. Degas’ ballerinas, Daumier’s laundresses, Bonnard’s dining room tables, or Rembrandt’s self portraits are just the way to open the conversation around what painting can do and how a painter can express herself. And this is the second reason that I paint: it is to witness the act itself as it leaves a record of what was seen and felt.
I was an abstract artist at one point in my life, but infinite variety of forms, color, surface, and subjects in the world drove me back into figurative art. For instance, peonies are beautiful in the manner in which they move through space, react to light, and present structures (the seed pods, variously shaped specimens from single to bomb, buds, etc.) slightly weird and always interesting. Faces are wonderful and difficult as structure, surface, and expression; painting a portrait is rather like a complex juggling act with a critical audience (the sitter)! And people in groups in a landscape almost impossible to capture as the complexity of interrelationships reaches a critical level!
Painting for me is comprised of two necessary components: skill and risk, neither of which alone is sufficient. Most figurative paintings that pass as art today are skillful copies of photographs. They are D.O.A. You can feel that nothing was at stake for the artist, and I can’t imagine anything more boring than spending hours copying a photograph! But it is very hard to move beyond the comfort of skills well honed, and this is where risk is so important. It is, I suppose, the final reason I paint: for the excitement of trying something new, and accepting the risk of failure.
I just took a year off from painting, at a point in my life when I really don’t have that much time left!! I didn’t mean to stop the work, but a series of difficult geographical moves left me without a studio in an unexplored part of America.
It is always detrimental to an artist to find the physical environment in which she works compromised. This is especially true for someone like me who, as an ADD personality, has only the most tenuous hold on discipline and forward momentum! When I had to close up my studio in the Belgo Building in Montreal and then chose to move to my daughter’s apartment in Dallas, Texas, I had thought to continue my floral and portrait work in Texas. Unfortunately, I found the loss of the Botanical Garden and my Montreal tango community very disorienting. It was as though, with the loss of my muse and my audience, I also lost my train of thought!
Without the distraction of a whole new planet to explore (and Dallas was like another planet!), I hope to get back on track with my painting during the next five months in Montreal. Happily I am back in time for peony season. This will be the third June that I will be sketching in the Botanical gardens. This time I will be using the watercolor sketches as the basis for paintings. The big challenge with this is how to maintain the spontaneity of the sketch in the oil painting. And my struggle continues to discover my unique ‘voice’ within a traditional subject matter.
The one useful thing that came out of the yearlong pause, was that, upon my return, when I unpacked my studio, I realized that many of the drawings and paintings I had done in the past four years were not worth keeping! So ruthlessly I threw tore them up or painted them over! (The noise you hear in the background is my friend André screaming “noooo!”). But here is the thing, after a year away from the work, it is very clear which pieces work; and which don’t, which have the germ of future directions, and which are simply going over the same tired ground. The laws of minimalism and sustainability apply here as well as everywhere else in my life!
I am looking forward to continuing this blog, The Painter’s Progress. I expect that doing my work in public, in front of you, my readers, will keep me honest. As always, your feedback is my inspiration!
Welcome to a new blog, “A Painter’s Progress,” a new website, JHart-Artist, and a New Year!
I made a few New Year’s resolutions that I would like to share with you:
Hoping to hear from you soon!
J.Hart-Artist 