Suppose I wanted to paint a portrait of Michael. Think of the options I have. What may come to mind are the many traditional approaches to this task, the models of portraiture in the history of art. I won't list them because there many and common. I would have a very hard time if I tried to paint his portrait so it would look just like Michael but unlike any other person's painted portrait. It think it would be impossible because all painted portraits are painted and because all portraits share some common imagery. No matter how much I try to exclude evocations of other portraits, I will never succeed. My portrait of Michael will always evoke associations to some other portraits and depending on the force of those associations in the viewer, some of them may even seem to replace the image of Michael. This sort of thing happens all the time. Even in everyday events, a person may see a photo of someone and say, "She looks exactly like her mother in this photo". Of course portrait artists have often purposely blended their sitter's likeness to that of someone else, often to transfer the public qualities of the latter to the former. So, rather than vainly try to exclude evocations of other portraits or attributes (ambiguity) one could decide to include them. Now how many? Suppose one says "as many as I can". For instance I could use scans or x-rays if need be and then paint them or simply present them as "painted portraits of Michael" (do not the machines "paint"?) even though few if any people could be sure they portray Michael more than they do millions of others. Suppose I simply paint a shape, any shape, and proclaim it to be a portrait of Michael. Who could say it's not? Since Michael himself is the product of hundreds of millions of others and since his associative subjectivity, (that which makes him Michael the personality we know), are themselves numbered in the hundreds of millions or billions, wouldn't it be more accurate -- at least in the effort -- to be as inclusive as possible in presenting his portrait than to try, hopelessly, to present a particular, exclusive image of him? I recognize the human need and desire to particularize things and experience. It works insofar as reaching short term goals, such as answering the question "What does Michael look like today, within the template of likeness my culture and traditions?" The deeper question to the artist is, "What does Michael represent, symbolize and call to mind about himself and consequently about human experience and me and how shall I paint that?" Start anywhere but at least recognize that any beginning will point to the same all-inclusive end and thus where you end indicates where you simply gave up.
On the other hand, neurologists tell us that the main area in the human brain devoted to facial recognition is huge in relation to other sense processing centers. They say that this is what enables us to recognize our friends, etc., even from a distance or to read the subtlety of emotions in a face. I suppose that leads us to prefer the quest for the particular in portraits but it also means we each have our favorite particulars. Pacheco, the teacher of Velazquez is said to have encouraged the painter to blur the facial features in a portrait because then each viewer will see the person they prefer. We can see that Velazquez followed that advice to stunning effectiveness. Elaine deKooning once made a whole series of portraits that simply show the faces as smudges but instead portray what she regarded as the sitters' characteristic body postures. Again, most of us can identify our friends and family from a distance on the basis of posture alone. So, to paint a portrait of Michael is indeed a daunting proposition. What would not be his portrait? WC . When William says, "the best approach regarding intentionality, which is the container word for meaning, is to avoid intentionality, to try to contradict meaning at every turn," I do not take that to mean to sabotage or thwart "meaning," but rather to disregard it, to deny its primacy, to ignore or be insensitive to preconditioned meanings that might already attach, not to connect the dots, and let the viewer do that ... because the viewer will, in any case.
