POST #163: Painting People

I’ve always been pretty good at painting people but not very good at painting portraits. John Singer Sargent, one of America’s greatest portrait painters, defined a portrait as a painting with “a little something wrong about the mouth,” (loose quotation) referring, of course, to the difficulty of capturing the planes of the area around the lips, but also to the fact that what the painter sees and what the subject hopes he’ll see are often two different things. Conventional portraiture is not so much an art form as a skill, something that can be learned, a form of pleasing psychophancy. Really good portrait painters manage to capture the subject’s interior life as well as a likeness. There’s also a great story about Picasso’s portrait of the poet, Gertrude Stein. When she complained that it didn’t resemble her, his response was “Don’t worry. It will.” (or words to that effect.)

Portraiture goes back several millennia to ancient Egypt when the pharaohs decided to place ‘photoshopped’ versions of themselves up there with their gods. Other ancient civilizations, including the Greeks and the Mesopotamians also portrayed their rulers, but in a stylized, non-realistic manner, more like gods than real people. It wasn’t until the humanizing influence of the Early Renaissance that ordinary mortals were deemed worthy of having their likenesses preserved. Over the centuries there have been a great many artists who could capture a physical resemblance but only a few who could - Pygmalion like - depict internal emotions as well as exterior appearance. Giotto, Rembrandt among the more noted

Once the camera appeared, portrait painting was doomed. Why bother? The camera can do in a second what would take weeks of hard labor and years of training to achieve in paint. However, even after the invention of the camera painted portraits remained popular producing some surprisingly great examples. Painters such as van Gogh and Modigliani and many of the German Expressionists, Kokoschka and (my personal favorite) Max Beckmann created portraits that went beyond mere photographic resemblance. However, for most of the 19^th and 20^th centuries photography has become the preferred way to record one’s appearance for posterity.

Today, good portrait painters are few and far between. Most of them specialize in what I call “Imperial Portraiture,” votive likenesses of Captains of Industry and Civic Leaders. And now, in the current Age of the Selfie, there’s no need now for anyone to even hire a photographer; the camera does it all.

I have never been able to “capture a likeness,” maybe because I never really worked hard enough to acquire the necessary skills, but I am good at creating “life” in my paintings. My goal is not to be a camera, but to get my subjects to talk to me, look into my eyes and tell me what they are thinking, feeling. It’s a gift and I have no idea how it came about. I recently completed a series of 54” x 24” oil and charcoal sketches on canvas.  I intended to use them in a series of paintings of Harlem I’m planning to work on next winter. However, I like the sketches so much I think I’ll stop right now. There are six “characters” currently residing in my studio, and they’re great company.