Portraits don’t just get painted.
Every portrait has its purpose, but, while the raisons d’être seem as individual as the subjects, they are always a reshuffling of the five following possibilities.
Gwenn Seemel
Yann (Paint The World)
2006
acrylic on canvas
16 x 10 inches
1) The subject of the portrait is deceased.
Portraits have a long history in preserving memories.
This is a portrait of my cousin, Yann. He died in 2006 in a motorcycle accident at the age of nineteen. His parents’ house is full of photos of him, but this portrait is something else.
Gwenn Seemel
Curt (A Beautiful Balance Of Opposites)
2007
acrylic on canvas
20 x 20 inches
2) Money was involved.
Portraits are the least likely genre to be created without a patron commissioning an artist.
I feel especially honored when my fellow artists, like Curt, commission me to paint their portraits. Curt told me that, before having this painting done, he had admired my work, but had always thought it was vain to commission his own portrait. Obviously, he got over that!
Gwenn Seemel
Megh
2007
acrylic on canvas bag
13 x 13 inches
3) The subject’s appearance is arresting in some way.
Painters enjoy recording the particularly lovely and otherwise striking possibilities of the human form. It’s challenging to show a subject’s rare qualities while at the same time making them believable.
Simply put, the subject of this portable portrait is stunning. I also happen to like Megh a lot (see reason #4).
Gwenn Seemel
DavidDavidDavid (Clown-Angel)
2005
acrylic on bird’s eye
17 x 16 inches
4) The subject is an object of the artist’s affection.
The stories about artists seducing their models are as countless as they are nauseatingly repetitive, but it doesn’t always happen that way around. An artist can love a person before they paint her-him, and often the artist’s partner, parents, siblings, and good friends are her-his most loyal sitters.
This is the first portrait I painted of my sweetheart—the first of many!
Gwenn Seemel
Bill Bradbury
2005
acrylic on canvas
24 x 18 inches
5) The subject is important.
I am purposefully vague in the wording here. There are many kinds of importance, and painted portraits touch on all of them.
A painted likeness can confirm the sitter’s authority, as in the painting of a king, but it can also serve to help establish a person’s importance. In old Europe, for example, the newly rich bourgeois class used portraits to assert its status—or, in other words, to imitate the nobility. And the popularity of portraits in early American society was a function of self-made men (and sometimes women) wanting to broadcast to everyone that they had, in fact, made it.
Beyond personal propaganda, portraits can celebrate the subject’s value in a way that forgoes the world of titles and social standing. Before all other considerations, portraits honor their sitters as human beings.
Bill Bradbury is the Secretary of the state of Oregon. His public office certainly makes him deserving of a portrait, but, more than that, he also happens to be a remarkable individual. As he so aptly described himself, he’s “97% fun.”
If the five reasons for painting a portrait had to be distilled into just one, it would be this one. Portraits always mark the sitter’s significance, whether that is as a memory, a patron, an extraordinary beauty, a loved one, or someone with authority. In her book Homo Aestheticus, anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake defines art as “making special,” and that’s just what a likeness does. Portraits make people special.*
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* I would argue that “making special” is just another way to say “causing revolution” but that will be a topic for another day!
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CATEGORIES: - Philosophy - On portraiture -
