Portrait Painting

Subject: Portrait Painting

I did a critique of David Hockney the other day and a friend of mine who attended the Bradford College of Art at the same time as Hockney disagreed with my appeal for more reality in painting and less representational, ((draw your own conclusions), art as to what it is which seems current today.

I have just been watching a competition of unknown artists painting portraits of 4 well known sitters. It’s amazing to see how the likeness evolves, a brush stroke here, a dab of paint there and slowly the canvas comes alight. Each artist has their own technique, some a detailed pencil sketch to gain the right proportion, for others it’s question of washing the canvas with colour to gain a background on which to develop the portrait, others use a pallet knife to build up the layers of paint giving a sort of three demential construct. Some artists seemed to come to a resolution quickly with the rest of the time taken filling out the already recognisable figure with light and shade  whilst others dally around on everything else but the portraiture. For them, like magicians it’s the with holding that counts. My leaning is always to the recognisable, particularly in portraiture, nearly always my choice is rejected by the experts and tonight’s winners were not the contestants I would have chosen.

Why is this, are it my sensibilities too blunt, my rational too stereotyped or is that me and the judges are looking for different things. Do the various techniques get in the way, does the more avant-garde style collect ‘knowhow bonus points’ like a judge at Crufts and my plebeian tastes are just that, plebeian.

I always feel sorry for the artist who has made a good fist at reproducing what’s in front of them but are cast aside for it.  The obtuse, wishy washy unhealthy looking representation seems to fill the judges boots and once again we are left to address the fake account of what’s in front of their eyes and being rewarded for not being able to reproduce it. This distortion of real life and substituting it for something which is more in their mind than what we all can see gets bonus points for originality when, for people such as myself, all I need is the truth as it appears since I have no way of knowing what the distortion means. Perhaps this world of conflicted images distills our own confusion.