Or, I mean, it is my portrait, but I’m not the subject. I painted it. When someone talks about their portrait it’s usually of them and not by them.
Who has more right to feel possessive a portrait? The artist who is its author, or the subject who is, in a sense, its other author?
But this self-portrait by an admirer of my work has nothing to do with imitation.
...and one giant leap for portraiture!
An allegorical portrait unites a sitter’s likeness with the attributes of a character from literature or history. The best of this genre references something outside the subject as a way of revealing still more about the individual portrayed. More than an exceptionally interesting kind of portraiture, allegorical portraits deserve to be named top genre in the hierarchy. After all, these paintings bring together two of our favorite things, faces and stories.
Though a much-demeaned genre, painted portraiture has always had its defenders, in the name of both its money-making potential and its ability to tell an important story.
Long before the camera and its progeny, Modernism, spat on verisimilitude in painting, the Art Academies had discredited portraiture. The special irony of the genre is that, though it can’t seem to earn respect in elitist circles, everyone is flattered to be a model.
Portland artist William Park painted this self-portrait in 2003. I look at his work, along with the work of many other artists, to learn more about what I do.
I’m convinced that there is only so much a person can learn about how to apply paint to canvas or how to represent people/places/things without mining what’s come before for tips, tricks, hints, and directions.
The promotion of your work is more important than creating excellent work.
My father quite likes this painting. He is a big fan of our first President, so he was happy that I referenced Washington with this image. That said, upon seeing the completed portrait, he asked me why I had combined a Native American’s likeness with George Washington’s. I replied, “does it make more sense if I tell you the painting is called First American?” He laughed and nodded thoughtfully, “yes.”
Well, actually, I did make the painting, but I didn’t document it, so I may as well never have made it. I remember why I didn’t photograph the painting, and the reasoning seemed to make sense at the time. Five years down the line, though, I’m feeling pretty sheepish about my decision.
This wasn’t always the case, but in today’s world of digital information it’s a fact of artistic life.
Using words with images is tricky. Written language and images are opposite. Words are understood as parts adding up to a whole, while images are whole first and, only after some study, a sum of parts. In order to fully understand a sentence, for example, the audience must read or hear all parts of it to know what the whole sentence means. Images, on the other hand, have an immediate visual impact which displays all elements as one whole. The viewer may discover more layers to an image upon further examination, but she-he doesn’t have to “read” all these parts before getting a sense of the whole.