Myths and misconceptions

The purpose of this article is to highlight and correct the two common misconceptions that pervade my work as a portrait artist.

Introduction

I would love to personally meet and photograph all of my subjects, but for economic reasons, I work mainly from photographs taken by other people.

These show me what the subject looked like at one particular frozen moment in time, and under a specific set of lighting conditions. I have no other knowledge of the subject.

The camera doesn't lie!

Throughout most of time, our ancestors were accustom to viewing drawings and paintings. There wasn't anything else.

In the mid nineteenth century, everything changed when photographic images first began to become available to the general public. History records people's initial inability to believe that they looked like their photographic portraits. It took but a short time for photographs to become accepted as faithful reproductions.

Nowadays, we really do believe that the camera doesn't lie. In consequence, we tend not to see or question anything anomalous in a photograph. This is somewhat ironic, given that advances in digital technology mean the camera now lies most of the time!

Conversely, when we look at drawings or paintings, we now question everything we see.

Meanwhile the aim of a portrait artist remains (as it always has been); not to produce an exact copy, but capture a likeness of a subject though subtle amplification of key features, and suppression of others. When I draw a woman's eyes, I exaggerate the width of her pupil, and under emphasize her crow's feet.

I had a customer not so long ago who complained that I had drawn her friend with a slight squint. I was able to show that the friend's right eye was clearly narrower than the left in all of the reference photos supplied. The point is that the customer failed to question the accuracy of her photos, but challenged my drawing.

So here is my first problem.

Anything I draw or paint invites challenge, and any anomalies in the reference photograph can become unwittingly augmented in my artwork. Essentially, I can only ever hope to produce a likeness to the person in the photograph, but am sometimes held responsible if the photograph has distorted the likeness to the subject.

The camera does lie!

Artists work from their imagination

As a portrait artist seeking to produce a truthful likeness to the subject, I might logically expect to be exempt from the need for a creative imagination. However, I often find customers expect me to know, or be able to see, things that are not in their photographs.

I know what "an eye" and "a mouth" look like, and how to draw them. But, I cannot imagine what "your" mouth looks like if I cannot see the detail of it in a photograph. Neither can I image the shape of "your" nose in profile if I only have a photograph of it from the front.

So here is my second problem.

Abstract artists create from their imaginations. Portrait artist copy from life (or photographs). They have always copied.

I cannot accurately guess or make-up missing details of an individual's face. No artist has ever been able to do this.

Just like a camera, I am able to create a 2-dimesional representation of a 3-dimensional subject, but I cannot operate the process in reverse. I cannot look at a photograph and build a 3-dimensional model of the subject in my head, just as we cannot make a real person pop-out of a camera that has taken their image.

Summary

I can only ever draw or paint what I can see.
I have no knowledge of the subject: I only know what I can see or am told by the client.
Poor photographs will always result in poor artwork. Poor artwork doesn't sell.