Details, details…
Details are the crucial difference between an older person’s face and a child’s.
With that in mind, when I’m painting the portrait of an infant, I avoid pinning down her-his features too carefully. I look at the subject’s face more whole-ly than I do when I’m looking at an adult face. There’s something about a child’s face that’s loose and too-alive for a portrait unless I focus on capturing that “too-alive-ness” instead of the specific features of the little person. By the same token, when I’m painting the portrait of an older person, I may still look at the subject’s whole face—and the way she-he moves and breathes—but I also get to relish the details!
I learned to make portraits by looking to my elders. I worked at a retirement home for a few years in high school, and it was during that time that I discovered how to draw faces. I would sit and talk with residents, following their lines as we chatted and capturing their likenesses as I came to understand how faces work. Before I found this amazing world of faces to teach me, I was drawing from photos of friends or of air-brushed magazine models, which are as difficult to maneuver as babies’ faces since they have had all their details glossed over. When a face is full of character (and wrinkles!) it’s easy to see how all the parts relate.
Gwenn Seemel
Nurturing Important Relationships
2007
acrylic on panel
24 x 24 inches
(detail below)
In this portrait of a ten-week-old girl, I thought of her face as masses—forehead, cheeks, her whole head—more than features since it was the placement of her eyes, nose, and mouth that made her likeness more than the precise shapes of those features.
Gwenn Seemel
After Another Year
2007
acrylic on bird’s eye
30 x 30 inches
(detail below)
The subject of this portrait is ninety years old, and she gave me plenty of character to fasten my eyes and brushes on. I wasn’t worried I’d lose myself in the masses of her face: her wrinkles helped me keep it all together.
I much prefer working on portraits of older subjects. There’s a certain laziness to this partiality since older faces are a map of terrain where the roads are already paved—so to speak! But then, too, with the likeness of an older person, there’s the challenge of conveying an entire life’s worth of character with paint, and that’s the sort of thing I love to do. After all, a proper portrait is only as good as its subject!
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- On painting kid faces
- Relating and portraiture
- On painting people I know
CATEGORIES: - Practice - On portraiture -
TEFCON...
Great stuff.
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