I’ve always considered portraiture a good method for keeping up on technical skills when I’m not feeling particularly inspired, or if I need to take a break from another drawing but don’t want to put the pencils down. Despite the compositional simplicity of portraits, they can pose challenges and not only in terms of technique. The elusive element in a portrait is whether the artist has “captured” the subject. Years ago, a friend of mine said something that has stuck with me. He said that a good portrait should make you care about a stranger. Since then, I don’t think I’ve attempted a portrait without that idea lingering in my mind.
I recently finished a little portrait series based on a trio of sisters who I’ve known for a few years. I used simple snapshots as reference since I much prefer their raw, candid quality to something more posed.
Despite the old rule that drawing from life is better, I haven’t found it to always be the case. I’ve drawn a lot both from photos and from having a model in front of me and the results have varied widely. Such disparate end products can result from many possible reasons, of course.
This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with another Asian friend. She told me about a portrait of her which she had purchased from a street artist while on holiday in Paris, a portrait which, though she liked it, she had always felt had not quite captured her accurately. She felt, in fact, that the artist, who was a frenchman, had made her look too “western.”
My friend wondered why this might have occurred and whether it was because western artists have difficulty, or at least less experience, rendering Asian faces. I admitted that I hadn’t really considered it before but it certainly got me thinking. I thought back to very early drawing lessons learning about how strange and difficult it can be to capture the human form due to all the unconscious psychological influences and how symbolic the human face is. It made me wonder whether an artist’s sense of identity might make certain art goals more problematic than others. Did this french artist have a harder time capturing an Asian face because he wasn’t Asian himself? Or is a simpler explanation more likely, namely that he just needed to improve his technique. I have a hard time buying the simpler explanation since I saw the portrait in question and I thought it was impressive , though I agreed with my friend that it just wasn’t quite “her”. Can the old rule of “draw what you see,not what you think you see” overcome such an odd unconscious influence? It’s something I’ll need to think more about.
Keeping with the Asian theme, I recently finished a quick drawing based on a production still from the Marco Polo TV series. I saw the image and immediately wanted to see how well I could render it on the page. Admittedly, it was the first time I’ve tried to draw the surface of a flowing river. I kept it pretty crude but the end result was fairly decent.