Giving myself a complex
Recently, I asked some friends what one word came to mind when they heard “art.” They said:
Artist
Artist
Skill
Paint
Paint
Paint
Paint
Painting
Painting
Paintings, sculpture, jewelry
Landscape
Representation
Composition
Gallery
Gallery
Museum
Brushes
Music
Colors
Beauty
Beautiful
Emote
Human creativity
Inspiration
Life or capture
Anyone can make art if they are good at what they do
Anything
New
I then repeated the question with “portrait,” to which they responded:
Artist
Painted
Painting
Painting
Painting
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Face
Body
Image
Likeness
Depiction
Picture
Representation
Reflection
Vanity
Sit
Posed picture of a person
Camera
George Washington
The patterns of art being associated with “painting” and portrait with “face” were fascinating, but it was my sister-in-law’s full response that wins for its poetry. She said: “a portrait is a word and art is a story.”
But, even with all this information, I still wasn’t satisfied. I surveyed a different and smaller group of friends about the term “portrait artist,” and they came up with the following:
Rembrandt
Hans Holbein
Titian
My friend Gwenn
Mirror
Reflection
Distill
Interesting
Personable
Formal
Though the results are interesting, I think that the only thing that my polling demonstrates definitively is how neurotic I am about the status of my chosen genre!
To wit, when a fellow artist, Annie, responded to “portrait artist” with “sometimes it’s ‘hmmmm’ and sometimes it’s ‘wow!’” I questioned her rather forcefully about her answer. I assumed right away that she was making some kind of statement about the genre in general, about how it’s just mimesis and requires no imagination. But Annie explained that, as in just about any genre, there are some portrait artists who do their colleagues a disservice by using that title. Furthermore, she pointed out that, with portraits, a bad one is that much worse because it’s the misrepresentation of a person and that is by its nature more painful to look at than the misrepresentation of a landscape or another object.
Of course, Annie was completely right.
Present at this exchange was another artist, Mike, and he recognized my neurosis only too well. He has a background in illustration, and he says that, if you get a group of illustrators together, they love nothing more than to complain about how the art establishment doesn’t recognize or appreciate their efforts.
Indeed.
Two months ago, the regional paper mocked a local public official mercilessly for buying a portrait of himself. I came to the official’s defense in part because the likeness in question was my work, but also because the criticism implied that there had to be something wrong with a person for her-him to purchase a portrait. The editorial board of the Oregonian—and not the paper’s art critics—indicated that only someone with an inflated sense of self would consider doing that. I had to face facts, this wasn’t the art establishment devaluing my work, but people well outside that circle. I could either feed my complex and name the whole world as an enemy to my chosen genre…or I could drop it.
And, with a little help from my friends, I’m happy to say I’ve done the latter! This recent Wizard Of Id strip actually made me laugh. I didn’t even feel the slightest bit sorry for my chosen genre either!
In the end, my recovery comes down to a single realization. If the art establishment manages to make so many forms feel like they’re on the outside, I wonder which ones feel like they’re truly inner circle? Maybe that’s the joke of contemporary art: we’re all outsiders and, secretly, we like it that way.
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CATEGORIES: - On portraiture -
Ryl Mandus...
Gwenn, bear in mind that—so far—painted portraits have a far greater life span than either photographs or printed matter. And now I’m learning that digitally recorded data has an even shorter life span than photos or print—
—which all means that, as a painter of portraits, you’ll have the last word.
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