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My interest in portraits is related to the unique qualities brought out by the process of painting from life. Most of the portraits below were painted over a period of about 3 hours. This is a long enough time that all the fleeting expressions in a person's face pass, and what is left is a kind of core expression - something that cannot be removed. For this reason, a portrait painted from life shows a very different expression of a person than does a photograph. It can be likened, conceptually, to a photograph in which the shutter is left open for hours. It's because of this that portraits painted from life tend to look contemplative or serious. Indeed, smiling portraits are rarely found and are even more rarely satisfying, because a smile is transitory and, without having deliberately understood, we know from experience that a painted portrait properly conveys something else, something permanent. Of the portraits below, only the portrait of Dutch, the golden retriever, was painted with a photograph. It does not condemn a portrait to failure to use one, but nor does it exploit the genre's full potential. The size of these paintings range from 8x10 to 24x36, but most are not taller than 12". |
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