Some Thoughts on Portraiture

I tend to think of portraiture in terms of two ideal types. At least, this has informed my own approach to art, and I’ve moved back and forth with respect to which predominates in my practice.

First image: the painter as evil wizard, painting people to appropriate their souls, as a matter of control and power. The painter as unilaterally gazing at the subject, vivisecting them with their brushstrokes, pinning them down and preserving them as specimens, subordinating the world to their vision.

Second image: portraiture as a kind of collaboration, both painter and subject revealing something of themselves in the painting, art as a kind of translation or construction of a shared experience or seeing each other; you sit for me (voluntary), and I produce a depiction of that encounter.

Ultimately, I think that good art has to have a mixture of both – like any respectable postmodern, I reject false binaries – otherwise you’re either just painting yourself or your own image, or there’s no reason you are even the one bothering to paint the portrait and you’re merely performing a technical exercise (the former of these is why I don’t like Ingres – he depicts all of his subjects as a certain kind of ideal type and so the women he paints look like Ingres paintings, and not at all like themselves).

I also want to include a few interpretive clarifications:

1.     I want to push against the idea that this is a gendered phenomenon in terms of male/female artists, although it definitely plays out in terms of the artists relation to the sitter, and this is often along gender/class/race lines (I’ve seen people compare Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec on their depictions of the demimonde, and I think this tracks).

2.     Mutuality in art, responsiveness to the sitter is not the same as producing a flattering (especially not conventionally flattering) portrait (Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an extremely apt treatise on this, amongst other things).

3.     While I think Lucian Freud is much more the first kind of painter, his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II strikes me as one of the best examples of the combination of the two approaches. What’s especially astonishing about it is the degree to which it is a deeply antagonistic encounter: the Queen is surrounded by pomp and power, he peers into her soul and depicts that performance as a performance, and what is beneath it.