Likeness

In order to make a painting look like the person I'm painting, there are lots of factors that I have to take into consideration. First of all I have to make sure that everything is proportionate. The head needs to be the right size for the shoulders and the eyes and nose need to be the right size for the face. Then I need to make sure that everything is the right shape. I have to represent values correctly. I have to think about temperature and color. I have to consider saturation.

Painting the features of the head requires accurate drawing and careful observation. Noses and ears are the easier features, and often people won't notice if they are a little off. Mouths are harder. The portrait painter John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925) is quoted as saying, "A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth." But the most difficult feature to paint is the eyes. Making the eyes too big is a very common and novitiate mistake, and one that I unfortunately make all the time. The challenge with painting eyes is that they immediately become the focal point of the painting, especially if you position the subject to look out at the viewer as I have done a lot lately, and nearly everyone can tell if there is something wrong.

Sometimes I get a likeness, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I spend hours and hours just trying to make the portrait look like the person I'm painting. Sometimes I throw paintings away because after hours of struggling to get a likeness, I still cannot get it right.

Getting a likeness requires a lot of skill: the kind of skill that takes years of practice to acquire, and as we all know, skill has nothing to do with art. That's why we don't talk about it in critiques. We don't talk about primers, paints, or mediums. We don't mention if we choose to paint in the alla prima style or a more traditional approach.  We can't talk about proportion or anatomy. In art we don't care about skill, and we don't care about likeness.

So I quit. I have decided that as an experiment I will no longer use skill or try to get a likeness in my portraits.

I will begin a new series of paintings in which skill, accuracy, representation, etc. are no longer utilized. I understand the magnitude of the shift in my work, but I feel it necessary in order to progress as an artist. To highlight this removal of representational emphasis, instead of painting people I know, I will paint portraits of celebrities, and I will attempt deliberately not to get a likeness. My first painting in this series, "Portrait of Brad Pitt" (2013), is shown below. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.