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.

Brett Whiteley - in memory of

Brett Whiteley self-portrait, Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a Second), 1967
[image link from artquotes.net]

A few blogs back, a reference to Australian artist Brett Whitely came up, and since my Visitors Counter (no, my goons don't know where you live, just what flag you fly) now tells me I've had visitors from 125 countries, i thought i would introduce Brett to those in the wider world who might be unfamiliar with his work.

in Australia  Bret Whitely is a legend, a national treasure, an icon, an artist as well known as a football star.

There are plenty of biographies of Brett on the web, so i won't attempt one, other than give a few incredibly brief impressions of the man and his art.

Impression 1:
The ultimate self-portrait - a  painting of made oils, gold leaf,  collage, rock, perspex, electricity, pencil, PVA, varnish, brain, earth, twig, taxidermied bird, nest, egg, feathers, cicada, bone, dentures, rubber and metal sink plug, pins, shell and glass eye on eighteen wood panels, 2 x 16 meters!; not signed, not dated. It is a spiritual autobiography housed in the wonderful Art Gallery of NSW.

Brett Whiteley Alchemy, mixed media on 18 wood panels, 203 × 1615 cm, 1973
photo by Kitty Cate, www.flickriver.com/photos/catef/popular-interesting/

You can see very detailed close-ups of the work here and here.


Impression 2:
An Archibald Prize-winning (the Aussie Oscar for portrait painting) self portrait depicting the interior of his Sydney apartment (his face is in the hand-held mirror).

Brett Whiteley, Self portrait in the studio, 1975.
[image link from artquotes.net]

The Gallery of NSW, for the exhibition Whiteley himself and his friends 2004, described him as:
"Twice winner of the Archibald Prize, Whiteley is one of Australia's best-known and popular artists. He was a charismatic and energetic individual who gained early success and international acclaim during the heady 1960s and 70s. From a very early age he was fascinated by the romantic vision of the artist as hero - or anti-hero - and enthusiastically pursued his passions in both his art and life-style. When he painted himself or other artists he was relentless in his insightful psychological investigations of his subjects. Artists he admired included Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. Their faces fascinated him, as did their work, and he created many portraits of these two extraordinary individuals".



Impression 3:
A sometimes marine artist ... in love with Ultramarine,  celebrating the view from his balcony over Sydney harbour.

oil on canvas, 203 x 365 cm, 1975

It was hanging beside a wonderful John Olsen, Five Bells (oil on hardboard, 1963) on the day i visited, which i thought most apt for the two were good friends. My thanks to the Gallery of NSW who gave me permission to take these photos of Brett's The Balcony.

Brett Whiteley The balcony 2 hanging beside John Olsen's Five Bells
in the Gallery of NSW.

Below are some details i photographed from close up.

Detailed views from Brett Whiteley's The balcony 2.

Also on the harbour is the famous Sydney Opera House which he started to paint in 1971 while it was still being built. He had just returned from New York and was now living at Lavender Bay from where the Opera House was very visible.

Brett Whiteley, Opera House, 1982, oil and mixed media on canvas, 203x244cm
[image link from artquotes.net]

It was first exhbited in 1972, but in 1982, after some finishing touches, Brett gave it to Qantas (the airline) in exchange for free air travel. They decorated their club lounge at Sydney airport with it for amost 20 years before selling it off at auction.

Although the proceeds went towards establishing the Qantas Foundation Art Award, aimed to encourage emerging Australian artists, this corporate trading of creative soul bring some lines from Bob Dylan's (with whom Brett hung out while in NY) All Along The Watchtower to mind:
"Businessmen they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them know along the line
What any of this is worth".

See Brett's view from his Lavender Bay window in this clip (trying to ignore the fatuous tone of the narrator)







Impression 4:
Animal lover.

Well, he did say,
"Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia".

Brett Whiteley, Baboon, mixed media on panel, 90 x 77 cm, 1978
[image from artquotes.net ]

Actually, this painting is part the self-portrait triptych entitled Art, Life and the Other Thing which won the Archibald Prize in 1978.

Artquotes.net explains the significance of this work:
"In the lower left panel is a baboon that represents the addicted self of the artist or the "monkey on the back". The baboon is handcuffed and pinned to the ground with nails. It has its mouth open, screaming, while a hand in the top left corner of the panel offers him a syringe of heroin".

Despite his struggle with his drug addiction, Brett was to eventually die from it in 1992.

Though as Barry Pearce explains,
"Brett Whiteley is Australia's most sublime painter of birds. They have appeared, often larger than life, in many of his most important paintings. To him, birds are the essential symbol of the song of creation… It is not too fanciful to think of Whiteley’s bird paintings as self portraits"

Brett Whiteley, Untitled (Bird), oil on board with mixed media, 82 x 86 cm, 1978
[image linked from www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au]

Impression 5:
Portrait artist.

Brett Whiteley, Head of Christie, oil on board, 70cm x 61 cm, 1964
[image link from artquotes.net]

In this instance, of the British necrophile murderer, John Christie.

"Whiteley was an avid researcher for detail and the Christie Series in particular signify a fascination with the macabre. John Christie was a serial killer who lured woman to his home only to gas them to death and then rape the corpse. Whiteley spent many hours researching newspapers and case files to then create the series of photographs, screen prints and large mixed media paintings".  (Saville Galleries)

Impression 6:

Sometimes landscape artist in love Australian natural forms

Anything resembling the natural Australian female form, actually.

Brett Whiteley, The Olgas for Ernest Giles,
oil and mixed media on board,  210 x 240 cm, 1985.
[image link from www.abc.net.au]

This painting was inspired by Brett's trip to central Australia in the early 1980's and was painted in  tribute to the 19th century explorer to whom it is dedicated. It has been described as "all tits and bums", and yes, it does remind one of Brett's earlier nudes. Having been to the Olgas myself, I can attest to their rounded sensual forms, though walking among them gave me a distinctly eerie and numinous feeling, nothing like the rollicking love-buds celebrated here.

The Olgas sold in 2007 for AU$3,408,000.

UPDATE 6-1-12:
My interest in Brett Whiteley has surged again to the point that i have embarked on a series of works starting with contemplations in ink and leading via lino cuts to a large works in oil.

Harry Kent,
Brett Whiteley contemplates old age.

Harry Kent,
Brett Whiteley in Ultramarine

Viewers can jump to the start of the series HERE .



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is portraiture using photography bad painting ?

With the advent of this year’s Archibald Prize  the issue of photography in portraiture has reared its head, for example, in Christopher Allen's critical review in The Australian newspaper.

Which brings me to my blog comment today - re the use of photography in portrait painting. Well, not so much a comment as some musings.

Photography is not a replacement for drawing and painting. It never was, despite the once dire predictions of portrait painting's immanent demise with the arrival of the daguerreotype. Conversely, I believe there seems little point to replicating a photograph in oil paint. Though I don’t wish to be too catty about it. Maybe it is largely a matter of taste and artistic intention. Photo-realism and super-realism are simply not my cup of tea. Though I did notice last year at the BP Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery London, about a third of the entries were in that genre. Even more the year before.

I acknowledge at the outset that visual aids, especially mechanical ones, can leave all sorts of nuanced traces in the work, as illustrated so well by David Hockney (who had a career-long love-hate relationship with the camera in his own painting practice) in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. The premise of this lavishly illustrated publication is precisely that many great artists, reaching right back into the Renaissance, have used mechanical aids in their drawing and painting. He attempts to demonstrate that numerous famous portraits were indeed not simply painted from life by eye.

And I’m certainly not wishing to defend stilted, wooden, lifeless portraits, purporting to be naturalistic studies, that sit uncomfortably on a canvas, somehow out of plumb in a number of subtle and not so subtle ways because they were ineptly copied from a photo. The web is full of ‘studios’ that offer to turn your family snap into a piece of lounge room kitsch.

But questions keep popping into my head:

· Many insist that portrait should be painted from life. But how can a self-portrait ever be from life? A mirror reflection is a 2D image. Or aren’t self-portraits capable of being 'good' portraits? (better tell Rembrandt, Schiele and Kahlo)

· What about a portrait painted from another portrait? Not ‘Art'? (e.g., Bacon's version of the Velázquez Pope)?

· What about portraits painted from multiple photos whereby the artist creates a mental ‘summary’ that seems to be the ‘best fit’? Would it make any difference if he used video, with moving images instead of a static image? How is a video panning round the subject inferior to 'a sitting' where the sitter ‘strikes a static pose’?

· What is so sacred about the posing sitter? The literature on sitter performance, persona selection, self-image projection, transactional understandings of the sitter-painter diad, suggests more complex things are transpiring than a simple sketching of 3D form, e.g., Kozloff, M., ‘Portraiture and performance’ in  Face Value: American Portraits, Donna De Salvo, 1995.

· even the assumption that painting a portrait is primarily about painting a likeness is just that - an assumption. It seems like such an unassailable and self-evident truth, yet I believe it is a vestige of artistic objectives and commercial criteria that pre-date the camera. The first century of photography only served to underscore that requirement through competition. Even once well into 20th century expressionism, the assumption continued. It was not until post-modernism deconstructed the portrait, refusing to take the portrait at face value as a likeness of a sitter, but instead asking questions about how identity is contained in image, what identity is anyway, how shifting and slippery self and constructions of self and representations of self can be, that artists produced work that intended to either bounce off established beliefs about portrait through ironic treatment, or looked for other ways of representing self that a photographic likeness.

Mike Parr, for instance, is more concerned with mere snatches of multiple identities, with unconscious elements of identity, and with process used in developing images than he is in accuracy of a single likeness. He  explains, "I began to think that the self-portrait really was a record of traces in time ... that in a sense I was creating a kind of a dig. So here was this dig going on which was the true meaning of portraiture ... the self-portrait in the late 20th century has become a kind of fiction—a kind of absence rather than a presence and that the real presence is this collision of chance and intention and layers of process within that container."

What kind of work does this approach produce? "The video 100 Breaths is a multiple self-portrait and endurance test. Parr covers his face with 100 different drawings of himself. Using his mouth as a suction cup, he sucks them on one at time, then blows them off, gasping for air." (smh review).

· Can artists who have lost an eye ever paint a legitimate portrait since they have lost the stereoscopic vision deemed so essential to painting from life? What about artists who deliberately close one eye to assist their draughtsmanship?

· Or artists who use a Dark Mirror to highlight tonal values for portraiture? or use a camera obscura to assist draftsmanship? Or use perforated cartoons for figurative frescoes (Michaelangelo, Raphael)? or use tracings/transfers to assist getting the perspective of the face? Are all these practices somehow ‘impure’?

· What about artists who have a sitting, make sketches of the sitter, make notes re colour, commence the painting with the sitter present, but then take photos and complete the piece back in their studio – from memory, their sketches, notes and photos. Compromised portraits?

· What about artists who paint purely from memory, with no sitter present (eg, Maggi Hambling)?

· It seems behind such niggling about legitimate process in portrait painting is a broader question about prescriptive art practice. If we had all stuck to the rules of 19th century Paris Salons, where would painting be today? For behind such prescribed institutionalised scripts for artists lie questions about the nature of social influence (power); ruling elites (both within culture and in social structures); vested interest (whether defending personal prestige, or controlling the market); cultural tyranny inherent in fundamentalist and conservative values; career trajectories (fame and saleability); mass-media and myth-making (art-making as a constructed narrative); ethnocentrism and fear of the 'other' ... and ... alpha males.

The fact is painters, including great painters, have used photography in their art practice ever since that tool became available to them. Van Deren Coke, in The Painter and the Photograph: from Delacroix to Warhol,documents their use by placing the photo beside the painting in question for a range of artists including Munch, Henri Rousseau, Picasso, and Francis Bacon.

Similarly Aaron Scharf in Art and Photography documents the case of the use of photographs by the great painters. He even goes so far as to link the origins of Impressionism to Corot's use of halation-blurred photos in the 1840s (pp 89-92)!

Certain contemporary artists substantially or almost exclusively use photography for their portrait painting practice. Marlene Dumas, a case in point, works from newspaper clippings and old porno images. Catherine Kehoe uses old family snaps to interrogate memory and identity. Jenny Saville employs extreme close-ups and medical texts to assist her to render flesh in paint.
My personal interest is in expressive mark-making in portraiture. And I see photography as one (of many) useful and legitimate tools in painting expressive portraits. I thought Jenny Saville made some practical and convincing observations about the issue re her own practice:

“I use photographs a lot. I take lots of photographs of myself. There's a kind of snobbery against photographs when you do life painting. But I pillage information from anywhere. I really don't care where I get it from. I'll have photographs of my body, and sometimes I take photographs of bits of my friends' bodies, and I have lots of medical textbooks that I use as reference. ... I don't take a photograph of a whole composition, just fragments of the body. Since I work on such a large scale, I don't paint while I'm looking at the figure. Usually I have a model for about six hours, and do about 10 rolls of real close-ups. But I don't use the model when she's in front of me ... I find working from life really intimidating. I couldn't draw or paint on a size like that [indicating a medium sized sketchbook]. I find it so hard to do --unless I do a detail of an enlargement or something. There is no point in me doing a study like that. It's just more natural for me to use larger areas of flesh. I don't like working in a life-class ... I don't get anything from it.” http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/Body/saville.html

I find her pragmatic approach liberating. And may she be as idiosyncratic as she pleases in her technique. It’s revelations of practice like this that make me balk at blanket condemnation of photography as a tool in portrait painting. I also recall my elementary school teacher condemning the use of biros in place of pens as somehow less than ‘proper’ for writing.

But there is one more thought that buzzes round my head. I wonder why so many present day artists set such a high store on 'realism'. It is a if the sheer skill of creating photo-like images in paint was enough reward for the artist. The realist notion of portrait painting seems obsessed with reproducing a recognizable physical likeness, as if having achieved such a likeness was in itself the seal and guarantee of having painted a good portrait.

While the camera was used by great artists of the 19th century, they did not make themselves a prisoner to it. If a mechanical device can produce an accurate likeness with such ease, what was left for the painter to do? The same question, but of landscape painting rather than portraiture, is asked in this summary of Simon Schama's program on Turner in his Power of Art TV series:

Turner had anticipated the great 19th-century question posed by the invention of photography. If the camera could now make two-dimensional facsimiles of nature, of people, of places, what work did that leave for art? Turner's great nebulae of color gave one answer, but there was another to be had. Freed from the job of describing the mere look of the world, art could now go to the heart of the matter, the subjective vision of our mind's eye. Turner was the first true modern. Modern were his tempests of paint, modern his blown-up cloudy forms. Ultra-modern was his determination to tackle dangerous subjects ... For Turner, art was not a placebo. It needed to wreak havoc like the storm, to have the force of an avalanche or an inferno. Great painting, his painting, needed to risk disaster, the better to communicate it.

My personal answer is expressionism. I wish to represent inner states, (my own, the sitter's, both concurrently) not only surface appearance. A good photographic portrait may aspire to the same goal. So I have the further goal of representing those inner states not only through the composition of the work but by the very quality of mark-making i use to create the image. Hence my chosen project for my Masters degree. And this blog traces my journey of discovery and development.

Anyone any thoughts on any of this?