Cartoonists do it with just capturing "one' main feature of that
person.
mando
On Nov 28, 2009, at 8:08 AM, William Conger wrote:
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.
