Portraiture: this category includes articles and videos that talk about the genre of portraiture.

Details, details…

When we’re young, our faces are smooth: it’s only as we live and grow that we accumulate details.  Painting a child’s portrait is difficult specifically because of this lack of detail.

This is not my portrait.

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? 

Why allegorical portraiture is the SUPER GENRE

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.  These paintings bring together two of our favorite things: faces and stories.

The origins of allegorical portraiture

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.

Validating a mimetic art

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.

Portraits don’t just get painted.

Behind every painted face you see, there are only five possible motivating factors.

Every person is a work of art.

And, if they don’t know it, it’s because they haven’t yet sat for a portrait.

The look that looks at itself

Self-portraits are everything from a gauge of the artist’s self-image to a vital sign of her-his ego.  But beyond all that, they are a portrait of a person who isn’t looking at the viewers, but at her-him self. 

To flatter or not to flatter

The portraitist’s ultimate dilemma—or is it? 

Reviving and redefining a tradition

Painted portraiture is dead.  Long live painted portraiture!

Is it vain to want to have your portrait done?

Marc Acito, author of How I Paid For College, doesn’t think so. Not anymore!

This (for example) is a real person.

A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square: similarly, a portrait is usually figurative but not all figurative work is portraiture. Just what makes the painting of a person a portrait?

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