This month I’ve been painting a group of portraits of my family. I started with myself, then my husband, and finally our son. It’s been an interesting practice to notice how the experience of painting each one of us changes. For my portrait and my husband’s I worked from life: looking into a mirror for mine and asking my partner to pose for his. One of the challenges of working from life is needing to translate a three-dimensional thing into the two dimensions of a painting.
For my son’s portrait, rather than asking him to pose for hours, I opted to work from a photo instead. While it’s easier – in a way – to work from a photo because the camera does the work of flattening life’s three dimensions into two, it’s also easy to become obsessive about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL. This isn’t necessarily a good thing when painting. Part of painting is learning to discern which details to include and how much to leave out. The longer we stare at our subject, the more we discover. And if we include every little thing, the result will surprisingly look less realistic because of how our eyes and brains perceive what we see in real life. For example, if I paint an area in shadow with the same degree of detail and contrast as a part in the light, something will seem off when we look at the painting. For the spatial effect to work, we actually have to lessen the contrast and level of detail in the shadows.
Another part of what makes painting so interesting and complicated is the making of decisions of how to portray something or someone in a way that reveals an aspect of them and/or of the artist. It is an interesting challenge to make a realistic image that still looks like a painting rather than trying to make it look like a photo, which is more of an exercise in copying.
There’s also something magical about seeing an image in a painting, and then as you step closer to the work, gradually realizing that the image is just a collection of brush marks. (Have I mentioned that I often get into trouble in museums when I get a little too close to paintings?)
Here’s a collection of images showing the process of making the portrait of my son, from start to finish:
