POST #159: FULL FRONTAL – no nudity!

I have a friend who saves the art section for me from the London Financial Times. Writing about art, translating the visual into the verbal, is never easy and lends itself to pseudo-jargon and just plain bull s----. but FTs reviewers, especially someone called Jackie Wullschlager, manage to be erudite without being self-important or deliberately obscure. Every few weeks I climb into my bed with a stack of back issues and work my way through them. It doesn’t matter where the shows they write about are held or if they’re over by the time I read about them - I wouldn’t go anyhow - I always manage to learn something.

The March 18^th issue had an article by the aforementioned Ms/Miss/Mrs/Mr. ? Wullschlager that discussed a show currently at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam devoted entirely - reputedly for the first time ever - to full-length, life-sized portraits. Of course, being the Rijksmuseum, the stars of the show are two pendant portraits of a husband and his very pregnant bride painted by Rembrandt when he was in his twenties, two of only three such portraits in his lifetime. The idea of full-length wedding portraits only went back a century or so, invented by Cranach in 1514. I guess they were the equivalent of those elaborate formal wedding photos you used to see on everyone’s buffet. Most of the other paintings in the show, however, were of single figures, not pairs.

What prompted this post was a conversation I had with my friend Rachel who paints life-size, full-length portraits of ordinary people, i.e. the owner of a hardware store in Michigan and his wife. We were trying to figure out why artists seem to avoid full-length frontals and came to the conclusion that they are difficult to compose, given that the viewers’ eye ends up smack dab against the model’s belly button. How do you deal with that when you’d rather have them concentrate on the subject’s face. It’s interesting to see how some of the more famous full-length portraits in the history of art: Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy”, Goya’s “Duchess of Alba” or John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” deal with this problem. Rembrandt’s solution was to paint elaborate lace cuffs and waist trim on his pair, creating visual interest, but not enough to compete with their faces.

What prompted my interest in the subject was that several months ago I began a half dozen or so almost life-size oil sketches of people walking on 125^th Street in Harlem. I’m working up to a series of semi-abstract paintings like the ones I did of the Lower East Side several years ago. The figures are placed on 2’x5’ canvas scrolls. I start with a photograph or a sketch from life and end up with something almost entirely out of my imagination. I think my goal is to create companionship for myself in the studio, what my psychologist husband used to call my “Only Child Syndrome.”  (I was an “only child.”) When the person on the canvas makes eye contact with me, talks to me, smiles at me, I know I’ve succeeded.  I’m like the Florentine sculptor Donatello, who notoriously would scream at his statues: “Speak, damn you! Speak!” There’s an element of magic involved in all of this and while I have no idea how I bring my painted people to life; I just know when they contact me.