Expressive mark-making and 'likeness' in abstract figurative portraiture

Fukushima Ghosts III, oil on paper, 58x46 cm

My experimentation continues at creating evocative and  expressive images of people under extreme stress with this piece, the third of my Fukushima ghosts (see the previous two here) . My aims are to explore expressive mark-making in portrait painting, to make social comment on a current world event, and to create eloquent images about the human condition.

For this painting i switched to a black absorbent paper that soaked up the oil paint and medium. I flooded the paper with both. The pigment moved about through gravity as i rotated the paper at strategic moments. I was allowing the paint its agency. I was relying on its agency. It was a partnership. We, the paint and i, are co-responsible for the way the work turned out.

The  first painting  of my Fukushima series was fairly realistic, if somewhat stylized. Subsequent images have moved progressively deeper into what may be described as an abstract figurative style.

Abstract figurative painting developed as American Abstract Expressionism was running out of steam in the 1950's. Many had declared the death of figurative painting some years earlier, and saw Abstract Figurative painting as a contradiction in terms. These theorists maintained that abstraction and figuration were at opposite ends of a continuum and so it made no sense to mix them.

But in hindsight such assertions were silly and pointless. As Kandinsky says, "There is no must in art, for art is free." This was quite the sentiment of the new journal Reality, founded in 1953, when the founding committee stated  that the Journal's intention was “to rise to the defense of any painter’s right to paint any ways he wants.”

The movement referred to itself as Figurative Expressionism. So i guess that makes me a Neo-figurative Expressionist painter dabbling in Abstract Figurative portraiture. Not that i'm setting out to revive any art movement nor to prove some abstruse point in art theory. I'm just following the principle of a painter's right to paint any damn way he wants to.

But all that abstraction and expressionism does the raise the question, "What ever happened to portraiture being the painting of a likeness to someone?". How can a puddle of paint be called a 'likeness'? It may, at a stretch, be called figurative, but surely not portraiture.

I have touched on this issue in a  previous post when considering the legitimacy of using photography as a basis for portrait painting. Let me just add now that notions of what might be a portrait have considerably expanded over the previous century.

The Social Media Group observe that, "Traditionally, the ideal portrait both resembled the subject's physical appearance and captured the essence of that person. Contemporary portraits, however, are made within a cultural and artistic context with deep questions about the nature of identity, of representation, and of authenticity ... and technology is also changing the how we think about human identity: to portray the essence of a person, do we show the face? DNA? surveillance data? shopping transactions?" 

William Dobell's 1943 Archibald Prize win was controversial, as some people argued that his portrait of Joshua Smith so distorted Smith's features that it could not be called a portrait. The issue went to court, the case hinging on the accepted definition of portraiture: how faithfully did a portrait have to represent the sitter? Dobell's vindication expanded the concept of what could be a portrait, and abstract interpretations as well as conventional portraits were subsequently admitted to the Archibald.

The Post-Sigmund Freud years have seen more interest in the personality, the neuroses even, of the subject, and less insistence on accurate draughtsmanship in the production of a photographic physical likeness. With the rise of Expressionism we have come to value discovering the personality of the artist in his or her work. We prize Egon Schiele's drawings for those very reasons.

Francis Bacon painted a portrait of Lucian Freud not from a sitting by LF, not even from a photo of LF, but from a photo of Kafka as his inspiration (Kafa was LF's fav author at the time). Bacon's self-portraits contain some talisman of himself (a bag under an eye, or the sweep of hair across the forehead) but these iconic indicators hardly constitute a likeness in the conventional sense. Yet we accept that Bacon painted a portrait of Lucian Freud and numerous self-portraits.

A spokesperson from the British National Portrait Gallery put the view in an on-line portrait painting forum that “all of the body is a portrait. I've seen fabulous portraits, full of character, showing only a hand, personified in such a way that the entire character of the person was contained. Such work is rare, but possible.”

So a mere personification may be considered a portrait. Paintings containing symbolic objects alluding to the identity of the sitter may be considered portraits. A DNA printout, suitably framed and hung in the National Portrait Gallery, would be considered a portrait.

Maybe Fukushima Ghosts III is not a portrait. It is not of any known individual. Even if it were, the face is contained within the mask of a Hazmat suit. And the painterly treatment of the suit is so fluid that it is hardly even recognizable as a protective item of clothing.

Furthermore, the painting purports to be that of a ghost. And ghosts don't exist. So all-in-all, it can't be a portrait. It can't really even be called a figurative painting. Maybe a fantasy painting? Surreal?

Yet i don't think so. I think it is a portrait. It is a generic portrait representing many anonymous individuals currently alive and working hard in Japan. Indeed, the anonymity of the workers has been one the key themes running through my Fukushima series, for it is a socially telling marker. Their anonymity is revealing!

These generic portraits of anonymous workers are like the statues at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The identity of the statue does not have to be known but the sense of humanity, of service and of suffering behind the work is palpable come Remembrance Day ceremonials.

Actually, we don't recognize the persons in the vast majority of portraits we come across in our lives! And i'm talking Rembrandt and Singer Sargent.

That leaves us unable to say anything about the quality of the likeness. Yet we prize the portraits of these artists. We prize them for the painterly skill in their execution and we prize them for the humanity they reveal about an unknown sitter, about an artist long dead, about a time and society otherwise obscured in history.

rage against the dying of the light

Rage Against the Dying of the Light, oil on board, 76 x 60 cm

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

from Dylan Thomas,  Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (free copy) 

in Selected Poems 1934-1952, New Revised Edition

or you can listen as Rodney Dangerfield recites Dylan Thomas on YouTube


This is another painting examining the emotions of associated with aging, with entering the winter of life's seasons. Earlier I had looked at horror of dying, and briefly looked at stoic resilience in the face of loss of physical and mental functions. This time i wished to examine rage, what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross saw as a stage of anger in the grieving process. And i believe aging and approaching the end of life to be a kind of pre-grieving, for oneself, and for loved ones that are left behind, bereft.

and so i read afresh Dylan Thomas' wonderful poem, and its words repeated in my head as i savaged the paint from the tubes and grasped the nearest hogs hairs with which to stab at the surface.

i was intending to produce a sequel to my Pulvis et Umbra painting from a couple of weeks back. Thinking i would be doing an overwash of zinc white (it is more transparent than titanium white) as before, with the resulting loss of detail, i did not bother with a charcoal drawing nor with underpainting, as i had with a number of other works in this blog.

instead, direct application of paint to a bare black gesso surface. Black, to signify the absence of light, the infinite black, eternal darkness . "Turn out the light and then turn out the light".  So i reserved a large blank black area to the right to explore how a black space can somehow talk to the figure in a painting (to me, they seem to resonnate off each other, the black almost a figure in its own right).

Fast work, quickly developing an image, not getting bogged down in exact perspectives or precise naturalistic representation. Rather, aiming for just the basic feel of the thing, welcoming distortion as part of the expressive load in the image.

But as i was about to wash over the top in white, my eye caught the quality of the brush marks, and i recalled that my project is an exploration into expressive mark-making in portraiture. And so i left it, rough, raw, urgent.

my belief is that the manner of the brush marks betray, or rather leaks, the emotions of the painter at the time of painting them. The Italian Renaissance had a saying 'Ogni pittore dipinge se" - Every painter paints himself. The characteristic way one makes marks, rather as in handwriting, is specific to the individual and reveals something of the habitual disposition of the painter.  What others recognize as his or her style.

my desire always is for fresh marks of spontaneous energy and power. Maybe this painting will be a step in my journey towards that objective. That is really for others to judge.

so here it is. Rage Against The Dying of the Light, a self-portrait, of striving towards the light, of raging against the engulfing blackness all around, of the blackness seemingly speaking back in dialogue with the figure.

[To accompany this painting, i have posted some photographs celebrating Light and Lamps in my photo blog, the crystal cornea. See column on the right for a blog link.]

learning from Alex Kanevsky's mark-making

Harry Kent, Me Too, self-portrait, oil on PP panel, 42 x 60 cm

In my search for expressive mark-making, i have been most excited today avidly pouring over a wonderful collection of Alex Kanevsky's work at his Studio. And there are three interesting interviews where he speaks about his technique here at Vivianite, here at BroadstreetStudio and  here at rtspot.

There is also a threaded discussion  with contributors claiming to have seen him at work. They write of his palette in 2002 prominently featuring Alizarin crimson and Cerulean blue, with recourse to Ultramarine, and raw umber. Reputedly, Kanevsky recommends the use of Liquin, especially for over-glazing with a transparent color.

There is also mention of Kanevsky's model reporting that he took photographs of her. His use of photography is something he himself discusses in the above interviews. I found this interesting in light of my post  on the use of photography in portraiture.

But I didn't concern myself with any of this because my aim was no to clone Kanevsky's work, but to expand my own art practice through exploring novel materials and methods. So i went for my usual Prussian blue and titanium white, with a touch of Alizarin and also of Viridian.

The particular series of his works that i'm interested in i see were painted on Mylar. I recalled seeing some white sheets of plastic at a local hardware store that I had stood pondering over just the week before. So off I rushed to buy a 60x120 cm sheet.

The sheets were a brand of Bayer polypropylene (PP), not Mylar polyethylene (PET). Furthermore, they were not thin frosted sheets of Mylar, but highly glossy panels a couple of mm thick. After some non-starters, I discovered the best way of cut the panels (NOT a circular saw - anyone actually interested, just ask) and soon had two pieces, one 44 x 60 and the other 60 x 76. The smaller one was be used for my first experiment.

And so this morning I rushed out to the studio with the material I had been working on for my next composition, but now ready to make a radical departure from the wet-in-wet I have been working on for the last two weeks (see below).

I was at first worried the oil paint wouldn't stick to the gloss surface of this dirt-repellent material, but it instantly clung in thin or thick films, depending just on how I worked it with a painting knife. I soon discovered better tools than painting knives, for broader, more even application and greater control of thickness. For example, old credit cards.

I found to that mixing colours on the surface while spreading creates marbling effects that generally are not that pleasing. I suspect Alex Kanevsky pre-mixes his colours into homogeneous batches, at least for the background (faces appear painted in with great care).

A more satisfying, more complex and layered result is obtained by overlaying one colour over another. Indeed, i believe this of essence in his technique - very thing layers, scraped on flat, so thin that the previous layers shine through. It is the flat thin layering over a reflective gloss support that seems to be an important element of the technique.

And this where the PP sheet comes in. Its extreme gloss hard surface enables the thinnest of coats to be scraped across and left totally smooth. And very importantly to my taste, allows light to reflect back through from the pure white surface of the PP. Very much like the paper reflects light through a transparent watercolor to make it glow.

So here is my first alla prima excursion into PP sheet supports, and it has left me eager for more. Needless to say, it is a self-portrait on the theme of the angst of aging.

I tried the same way of applying paint using a similar motif on a piece of craftwood sheet primed with household undercoat-sealer.

The effect was significantly more muted. The acrylic undercoat and hard board soaked the oil out of the paint and soon left a matt finish.

The amount of light reflected through the paint from the white undersurface was reduced. The result was a painting that lacked the glow and lustre of the one painted on a ploypropylene support.

Harry Kent, Dark Night of the Soul, oil on board, 60 x 90 cm SOLD

and an image that emerged along the way:

detail from earlier version

If you are interested in PP sheet painting, some other samples of my work on PP sheet, though  quite a different style of painting using brushes instead of pallette knives, can be seen here. 

And here is where the palette knives (credit cards) on polyproylene sheet had taken me by mid June, two months later. (Seems my mark-making is just more restless and variagated than his calm and methodical layering).

If anyone else has experimented with Alex- style technique, i would love to hear of your results. Please share your expeience with all who are admirers of his style in the comment box below.

painting aging skin

Self-portrait with crepey skin, oil on paper, 38 x 38 cm

The search for intimations of weathered, thinning skin and hair – intimations of mortality – continues. Previously I had tried the paint-knife with paint direct from the tube, mixed with bentonite clay granules to attempt a 'crinkle-skin texture'. It looked like cat vomit. Fair enough since it the bentonite was sourced from Kitty Litter.

This time round, mark-making utilising very thin paint. Thin paint = thin skin?

Borrowing from water-colour technique, I created turps-diluted washes of Prussian blue, strategically spraying in additional turps to create flow of pigment where I wanted it, rotating the primed craft paper support to produce the resulting drain/grain direction.

I wanted a crepe skin, a creased and cracking skin, beyond Oil of Olay. The pics show how it turned out.

ho hum, interesting, sort of (*shrug*) ... but a long way short of the horror of this mortal coil as it uncoils.

I have a gut feeling maybe blood and guts are called for, skin parted, flesh ruptured, internal organs made external.

Could that be a credible metaphor for the internal state of the artist (me) mediated to the external world (you, gentle reader) through the proto-language of his mark-making?

Back to the lab, Igor.

expressive mark-making in portraiture

Harry Kent, Growing Old, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm

this self-portrait was painted last November upon enrolling in a part-time MCA titled
“Exploration of expressive mark-making in portraiture”

the purpose of painting this work at such an early stage was equip myself with a physical talisman, a touchstone with which to assay what follows, a point of reference to move out and away from as the studio experiments lead into ever murkier swamps

ah, those swamps ...
old prophets may come from the desert
but new creatures emerge from the swamps

and talk about The Creature From The Black Lagoon !

In his essay, 'Ogni pittore dipinge se, Leonardo da Vinci and automimesis', Frank Zöllner  explains that in art historical writing the proverb ‘Every painter paints himself’ refers to an artist who creates himself involuntarily in his work. At the same time, Ted Jacobs in  Drawing with an Open Mind  conceptualises drawing as the relic of movement, proposing that “linearity does not originate with the sense of sight, but in fact arises out of the sense of touch”.

Combining the concepts of these two theorists, I wish to explore the notion that ‘every painter’, most particularly myself, ‘paints himself’ because a painter’s marks are a trace or relic of idiosyncratic movement. Such movement with its rhythms, speed, pressure, dexterity with tools and with media handling is hypothetically particular to each artist’s combined physiology and acquired skill. Some artists deliberately seek to insert their presence into their work in rhetorical flourishes. But arguably all artists incidentally, even unconsciously, disclose something of themselves and their emotional state during the process of painting.

It is this second understanding I seek to explore through the painterly processes involved in portraiture via a variety of gestural mark-making. I wish to build an expressive visual language in portraiture that offers a set of signifiers and marks, readable as referencing a sitter while simultaneously tacitly revealing my emotional response to the subject and, more broadly, my existential state as an artist and human being. The focus will not be on producing representational likenesses (‘portraits’) as such, but be squarely on the process of expressive painting itself.

And behind this methodology of practice-led research lie deeper issues of human perceptual processes and philosophical issues about the nature of truth, illusion, mental and cultural constructs, and reality itself. Gombrich (Art and Illusion), after establishing that knowledge of paintings, not nature, enable artists to paint picturesque landscape, then cites Constable's belief that only experimentation can lead an artist out of the confines of learned ways of seeing and mark-making, "can show the artist a way out of the prison of style toward greater truth". Constable treated his practice-led mark-making research as a natural science, not an art form, because he saw it as an investigation into reality.

The imperative for experimental mark-making is all the more urgent ever since Vincent showed us that the nature of marks can be used for expressive purposes, not only to represent appearances in nature, but to map and flag emotional states of the artist. This break with naturalistic representation of landscape in painting, (which Gomrich showed was as illusionary anyway as any trompe l'oeil), freed painting to move into expressionism with all the colour riot of Fauvism.

As an aside, i observe so many people gravitate towards naturalistic representational portraits that are not content with capturing a likeness but which insistent on near photo realism, despite so many decades of the modern art movement having established that a portrait is a painting, not a person. What mental, emotional and aesthetic satisfaction do we find in a literal trans-migration of a photo image into a painted image other than an impressive demonstration of the craft of paint and tools handling? With our lives festooned with cameras, even in phones, and idealised digital images of the human form where ever we turn, why would we wish to see even more of them in paint?

which is why i look for other qualities in a painting, qualities a photograph cannot provide.  ... and so, looks like a year of exploratory and experimental self-portraits coming up

first stop – mirrors, since mirrors were the first stop of portrait artists in years gone by

I mean, think about it, the self-portrait can never be a life-drawing. Photo or mirror, a self-portrait is always a copy from some 2D surface.

Errr, except if I feel my face with my hand (palpate) and paint an impression from that. Or paint what I remember myself as once having looked like in years gone by. Or paint what it feels like on the ‘inside’ to be me rather than naturalistically what I look like on the outside. Or ... Or ...

See – already – swamps, swamps, swamps.

Update:      two months later this quest had led me here, here, and here.