This is not my portrait.
When clients or their friends go on and on about how much they love a portrait that I painted, my response is always the same. I tell them “it’s the subject.” It may seem like a canned compliment, but I mean it every time. For obvious reasons, I wouldn’t be able to create any of my portraits without someone to sit for them, but it’s more than that too. An artist needs a face and all the personhood that goes along with it to make a likeness, and that who-ness isn’t created overnight. In a good portrait, the subject’s contribution to the piece should be as apparent as they artist’s.
Maybe that’s why when someone says “my portrait,” it’s usually assumed that it’s of them and not by them. As the sometimes-brilliant Richard Brilliant writes in his 1991 book Portraiture: “there is great difficulty in thinking about pictures, even portraits by great artists, as art and not thinking about them primarily as something else, the person represented.”
Brilliant implies that not only does the portrait not belong to its painter, but that it’s not even art! This isn’t going to turn into me ranting about portraiture’s beleaguered status again, I promise! But Brilliant’s logic does add a whole new facet to the problem. He is essentially saying that portraiture transcends the artifice of art. It is its subject—it’s ALIVE!
I like to think that the one thing that might most hold portraiture back in its struggle to qualify as fine art is also what makes it so great. A portrait has a real and vital life away from the artist, and that’s all any artist could ever want for their work.
Gavin Shettler (Portland Art Center)
2003
acrylic on canvas
48 x 34 inches
This piece is, in a way, one of my most admired portraits, but its popularity has nothing to do with me. It’s all about the subject. Gavin Shettler is a curator here in Portland. His movings and shakings tend to be fodder for art blogs, and, looking to add a little color to their posts, many writers use this image. I am pleased for my work to have this kind of exposure, but only when I’m given credit for it.
A couple of years ago, a fellow artist lifted an image of this portrait from my portfolio site and published it on his blog for a major newspaper without mentioning me. I thought that, being an artist himself, the blogger would understand the value of intellectual property, but, through an email conversation, he revealed that he did not consider my work worthy of credit. Though he didn’t put it quite this way, I gather that he felt that this portrait belonged more to Shettler than to me.