II
Portraiture & Memory
“I think the way I draw, the more I know and react to people, the more interesting the drawings will be. I don’t really like struggling for a likeness. It seems a bit of a waste of effort…If you don’t know the person, you don’t really know if you’ve got a likeness at all…I think it takes quite a long time.” – David Hockney.
We are several billion individuals, all a part of something bigger. A community and an individual cannot exist without the other. A community needs individuals, and an individual that often and regularly interacts with others can not be considered separate from that community. Observation is participation. Community and friendship is what the separate individuals make of it.
Every life lived and spent is unique from one another. Choices and experiences set us all apart, and our interactions entangle us all in many various intertwined paths. Thrice the artist Karen Berger and I made separate decisions that put us in the same situation, and it was the third decision that cemented our friendship. First we met in driver’s education, second in a ballroom dancing course, and third in our choice of college and degree. Our lives ran on vaguely parallel paths without input from one another. Our lives are shifted by our social interactions, no matter how small they still have an effect. Person by person, we make up the whole of our social experiences.
An interaction is not limited to a physical meeting. By simply being around others, a person is interaction. One cannot block the presence of others if they are around them. An observation of an action creates a memory and every memory changes us just by its existence in our subconscious.
As I participate in friendships, I document them through art and writing. Every day is cataloged in my online web log and my sketches commit my memories of events for personal posterity. A sketch is a memory regurgitated, as the contemporary painter David Hockney points out, “When you move your head everything moves with it, and the artist must learn to make very quick notations to fix the position of the eyes, nose and mouth to capture a “likeness”.” As the artist, I perceived something happening and I committed that memory of action to paper. These representations are inhibited and bolstered by my own technique and ability. Memory itself is flawed. A drawing will never be the event that occurred. It is a representation of a memory that has been restricted by the one who remembered it.
My thesis work is based around the documentation of a moment with a friend, and the appreciation for their being that the act of drawing them creates. Notable historical mementos of moments are the works that were produced during the Grand Tour. Taking place in the late 18th and early 19th century, the Grand Tour was an educational journey. Many affluent American and Europeans toured to Italy and the surrounding areas to study. The city of Pompeii was being excavated and proved to be an ideal locale for educational study. As a token of the years spent in study of classic architecture, art, and literature, many of the tourists commissioned portraits of themselves at the sites. Pompeo Batoni was very popular painter for work of this nature. The journey doubtlessly was important, but having the education and experience wasn’t enough for the travelers, as they had to leave with something tangible for their efforts. This artifact became a measureable reflection of a part of what they had accomplished. It didn’t sum up all that had been learned, yet the part stood for the whole.
The subjects I represent are not asked to perform in a constructed or composed manner. They are asked just to have some moments of our time together documented. Through drawing them, I am inexorably placing myself into the composition with them. While no hint of my being is in the drawings, the situation under which they are created puts me in the moment. I am in the full scene of the source for the image, but only a segment of the scene is represented. All of their actions are affected by my continual presence.
Indeed, all interactions are affected by the continual presence of those participating in them. Changes in personalities, I’ve observed, can have a change on the dynamics of a group for a short time. Certain friends can lighten the mood, while others foster pensiveness. Every meeting is a progression of the sum of all the other meetings. What happened earlier in life adds to what happens currently and that contributes to what may happen later. Dynamics of relationships change because experiences change the people in relationships. Each portrait is a representation of a moment in a friendship right at that point in time. It is a culmination of everything that came before it, and will effect what comes after in a near unmeasureable way. It is both my emotional perception of the person and my perception of the moment. What I observe of my friends is ruled by what I look for in my representational decisions. Getting a likeness of their jaw may not say much about a person as much as capturing a movement or gesture might represent. Extraneous irrelevant details are edited out. The art is bound by my memory of the person. All of the work is a portrayal of how I see them. All of my subjects exist in memory, and immediate memory is what I pull from to represent them.
Some drawings show a perception of a memory of a person in a more effective manner than others, and these are the ones selected for my project. The posters I create build up a representation of the members of my community. Each one is dedicated to one or two friends and my portrait of them. Each poster is both a vignette of our relationship and something I have seen in them. The desire to create work that represents a part of my memory of an individual is what spurs me on to make, and in the final state give the work back to the community I represent.
The art that an artist chooses to make is in some way a self portrait. By representing artistic choice, the pieces put forward a part of the spirit of the maker. The willingness to produce subjects of a specific nature speaks to the personality of the artist. Choice itself is a portrait because the paths that are picked out of free will all indicate something about the one who picked them. Individuality is a sum of choices and expression. Where there is free will, making art is a high representation of a personality. There isn’t an obligation to make a piece that wouldn’t have a use beyond aesthetics such as a chair or a lamp. The choice to devote oneself to a creative practice is a tremendous act of free will. Often only the artist is invested in the process at first, and is the one pushing themselves forward to create more art. Triumph in the arts, however the creator defines it, is achieved in an environment where the option to stop is given every single day. As a career picks up momentum, the community that forms around art and artists starts to encourage and push a creator. Agents, families, and gallery owners start to become dependent on the artist to continue to create. If art isn’t the main means of financial support, an artist can make whatever they like. Art is an ultimate choice, and choice portrays the maker.
My favorite conversation topics detail the adventures of my friends. I enjoy talking about the accomplishments of those around me. In reflection of what this might say about me, I have come to many conclusions. One is that I live through my friends. When I know someone who has done something amazing, I feel in a small way that I have participated in what they have done simply by being a part of their life. Second, the achievements of my friends encourage me forward with my own goals. I see those around me getting things done, and it enables me to sort my own drives and goals out. I find it difficult to be unproductive around productive people. It is a team of artists competing in different fields and working together for the greater good of the community. For the first time in my life, I have a solid supportive group. I was a cliché loner before I arrived at art college and with great friends came great ambition. The work that I enjoy producing is that which is representational of my newfound collective of comrades. As we work, I sketch the workers. I draw moments of their lives, and because I am there to make the images, they are moments of my life. The work that I make is a portrait of my life.
My definition of a portrait is a representation that conveys a nature of character of a person or place or object. It is a portrayal of the story, history, or connection that something may hold. A portrait isn’t simply a representation of a face, because a face only shows what a person looks like, and everyone is more than just their appearance. Historically, portraiture is dominated by depictions of appearances. Often incorporated into these portraits are visual clues and symbols to the subject nature. The nature may not represent the truth of the subject, but an ideal they aspire or desire to show. As traditions of portraiture have become less strict, the space for what defines a portrait has been opened up. I came to portraiture because I have always loved drawing people. I am, however, not solely drawing people as representations of their being. The setting, line value, posture, hue, and included items all sum up to their portrait. As we are not just our faces, a portrait often needs more to represent a person fully.
David Hockney, born 1937, is a contemporary British artist. His lengthy career has incorporated many techniques and styles, from his camera lucida experiments to watercolor and oil paintings. Just as Hockney’s landscapes were portraits of a place and time in his life, his figurative portraiture reflects his relationships to his subjects and how they have grown over time. The change in portrayals is most evident in two works of his friend Gregory Evans. In 1975, when he made Gregory Leaning Nude, the details and portrayal are very tender and represent the subject as a romanticized lover. Forty years later comes Gregory Evans, a somber clothed figure. At the moment of this painting, Evans had recently lost his mother. As noted in Sarah Howgate’s essay Portraits, Places, and Spaces¸ “Only a close friend would allow this degree of intimacy at such a private moment and the portrait is sensitive to the subject’s mood.” The two portraits speak volumes about the growth and change of Evans and Hockney’s relationship, as well as represent the different places both the subject and the maker were at the time of the conception of the pieces. Striving toward representing a person in a fitting manner while simultaneously saying something about the person requires immense consideration. The aim of a portrait of a person is to speak into their life, and if it is a representation of someone the artist has forged a relationship with, it indicates a portrait of the artist as well. Consciously weighing the value of certain elements and editing out extraneous details are largely decisions of the artist. What stays and what goes in terms of achieving a likeness are dependent on what the maker assumes of their subject. A portrait is what the portrayer notices and thinks of their subject.
Experience culminates into what forms the basis for the assumption of the subject. Memory is a valuable part of the technique that goes into portraiture.
Howgate, Sarah, and Barbara Stern Shapiro. David Hockney Portraits. Yale University Press, 2006.
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. 25th ed. Vintage, 2007.
Kleiner, Fred S.(Fred S. Kleiner), and Christin J. Mamiya. Gardner's Art through the Ages. 012th ed. Wadsworth Publishing, 2004.
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