Portraits

I have always had a fascination with drawing and painting people. This desire was there when I first started to draw seriously many decades ago. While my first attempts to draw the face or the human body were fraught with problems. The first challenge was to create drawing that looked human and could represent real person.

The size and proportion of the eyes or nose, the height and width of the forehead, the width of the mouth were areas of focus. With bodies the proportion of the limbs and the challenges of foreshortening were all problems to address. Eventually these became part of the observation process and other questions became more important.

The next steps involved going from grey scale to colour and then how to capture an expression. Sometimes the drawing or painting turned out with luck- an nice expression was captured although not entirely what I was attempting. Many hundreds of drawings later and many years of life drawing sessions with a live model, I was able to notice the slight squint of an eye or the slight pursing of the lips. It was a significatn moment in my artistic path when I was able to capture a likeness that other viwers could notice.

Moving from figurative paintings to portraits seemed like a logical but challenging step. Capturing a likeness is important but a portrait can and should be so much more. Equally important to a likeness ('That looks a lot like John, but John looks sad in this painting whereas I think of him as a happy personality'. One can put a lot of work into dupicating a close copy of a photograph (and that is a big accomplishment) but is the painting capturing must that mili second of life that was in the photo versus the bigger personality that exists beyond the photo? Obviously selecting the right photograph is a big and neceasary step. Colour tone, composition and painting technique become issues to address.

I much prefer to draw a person from life but that is a luxury that may not be available. A secondary choice woule be to take photos of the person myself so that I have control over the composition, lighting, and can also take auxilliary photos of the setting. One of the big challenges of using photos is the lighting and to figure out what is going on in the shadow or shaded areas where the image is faint or blurry. (It's really hard to create a fake mouth or eye that you cant see!)