Scientists and toddlers agree: eyes are the most important aspect of a face. They are the location of communication, and they are both subtle and powerful in their influence. All of which contributes to making the mouth a thoroughly overlooked expression-maker. Mouths are at least as revealing as eyes--and maybe more so, it’s just that we don’t know how to read them. And if we don’t, it’s for one simple reason: there isn’t a mutual engagement between one person’s eyes and another’s mouth. In that scenario, the mouth is doing the communicating and the eyes are doing the receiving. There isn’t the back and forth that exists between two pairs of eyes.
But if mouths are under-appreciated in social interactions, they can at least claim a special place in portrait-making. The (sometimes reluctant) portrait painter John Singer Sargent reportedly described a portrait as “a likeness in which there is something wrong about the mouth.” He is supposed to have meant it as a sarcastic retort to viewers who believed they saw his subjects more clearly than he did, but I think there’s more to the famous statement than that. I think it has more to do with the delicate nature of capturing a real person’s mouth in paint--with the impossibly nuanced world of lips and expression. The mouth in a portrait requires much attention if it is to resemble the subject’s!
In a very real way, our mouths are the windows to our souls. It’s obvious with children: they don’t control their mouths’ movements in the same way that adults do, and their every mood shift can be read in their lips. Adults may be more aware of their lips, but nothing reveals more about a person (and sets the tone of a portrait) like a mouth.
This is the source image for the mouth in this portrait.
The full portrait does not show much of the subject’s eyes, so the mood cannot be read in them.
Instead, it’s the hint of a smile in her mouth which gives the sadness of the painting a slightly lighter tone--almost a wistfulness.
But for that to work, I had to get the mouth just right.
Here, I had made it look as though the proper right region around the mouth is convex (pushing out from her face).
By this point, I had reigned it in, but the mouth was lacking in details--I had lost the texture of the subject’s lips.
detail image of First American (Native American)
The subtleties of mouths are endless. The Mona Lisa’s lauded smile is, after all, at least half in her lips.