To "cheese" or not to "cheese?
 

In preparation for an upcoming portrait of my daughter, my wife and I were looking at some potential reference photos I had taken. In trying to reach a decision we were looking for a photo that would best display her personality.

The photo we thought best represented her was a photo of her smiling. After all she is a very humorous, fun, outgoing person. My first reaction to the photo was to say no because "smiles" are deemed primarily as non-traditional. After our discussion I made my way to my library of books upon which I chose one on Sargent's work (Richard Ormond's "Paintings of the 1890's" Vol.2). Surprisingly, I found many of his portraits to contain these "no-no" smiles.

I think the expression of the subject should represent the personality of the subject. I'm cautious of a lot of these "art absolutes" I hear or am I missing the boat?

Mike,

You might want to begin your research here. At the top of the forum screen you have a menu bar where one option is "search messages." I think you'll find much interesting reading...

Mari,

Thanks for the link.

I agree with much of what I read and I make it a practice not to paint smiles where the other facial features are distorted but I have met artists who think you can never paint smiles or grins and I think we miss out on conveying to the viewer a very important characteristic of the subject, particularly to those who will hopefully view our paintings after we are long gone.

Thanks again!

Not to Cheese
 

Hi there,

I think that some of the most intriguing paintings of people that I have seen either show perfect teeth, no teeth or exagerrated awful ones. So, if the teeth are perfect or if you are going for a portrait of a real "character" then say cheese. If not, then consider not doing it.

Kevin Aucoin, the famous makeup artist for models said to never say "cheese" when posing with a smile. He said that the word "thirteen" positioned the mouth much more pleasantly. My vote is with the NOT cheese, or make the teeth as perfect as possible without losing the likeness, or make them insignificant by not adding too much detail to them. Good luck as this will be a fun project for you. :)

Mari, the link you supplied here doesn't seem to work now. Could you give it again? Thanks!
Anne Bobroff-Hajal

www.AnneBobroffHajal.com
blog.AnneBobroffHajal.com

Hello, Mike, I very much agree that if we never paint our subjects smiling, "we miss out on conveying to the viewer a very important characteristic of the subject, particularly to those who will hopefully view our paintings after we are long gone." Generally I feel that human expression is more important than purely physical appearance in creating our bonds with each other. So to me, capturing the subject's unique facial expression is a critical element of portraiture. And the smile creates some of the closest human bonding of all. So I believe it shouldn't be excluded from portraiture by hard and fast rules - especially when the subject is a humorous, outgoing person, as you describe your daughter. A portrait of a person like this should capture her outgoing spirit as much as her physical appearance.

As some one new to this forum, I'm realizing this is an old thread, and I'm not sure what the etiquette is in pursuing it years later! However, the reason I launched into this is that I would love if you could provide names of some specific examples of the Sargent paintings you were referring to - I'd very much like to find & view them.

Thanks,
Anne

blog.AnneBobroffHajal.com
AnneBobroffHajal.com

I respect the reasons given for not smiling, but if the child is always smiling and this most accurately shows the personality, I'd go for it.
It does distort the face so that the eyes are smaller and the cheeks are fuller, though.

The teeth can be de-emphasized even in a full grin, through the use of lowered constrast, blurred edges, and not showing full details.

Probably the most compelling reason the "traditional" portraits of the past did not show many wide, toothy smiles is the difficulty of having the sitter "hold that pose" when working from the life. The spontaneous, sincere expression in a smile can rapidly become a pained grimace . . . then there was the lack of dental care . . .

A huge pitfall for the modern portraitist is all the difficulty that attends working from reference photos as opposed to working from the life. No doubt you've read lengthy discussion of the pros and cons on these boards.

I agree heartily with Julie. At least twice, I feel I made a misjudgment of my sitter by not painting them with a smile that flashed some teeth (I tend not to favor "snapshot" smiles). The demeanor and personality of these individuals was such that in fact, it was in their character always to be smiling broadly - but not feigned, and naturally spontaneous.

Sargent
 

Sargent........

Frans "Cheesey" Hals
 

Hals was a master of the "fleeting" moment. No photos! Amazing!

There are portraits that show teeth but the person isn't smiling broadly, or even smiling at all. Then there are others that show the person smiling, sometimes with a closed mouth, sometimes with an open mouth. I just looked through Sargent's collected works and found all sorts of variations, two of which I posted below.

I have never been a special fan of painting people with wide toothy grins, mostly because it looks static to me. Sargent relied on direct observation to paint, and his smiling people don't look static to me. Although he captured a moment in time, he probably waited for the moment to occur many times over, kind of like painting surf. The wide grin caught on a photo is great as a photo, but in my opinion it doesn't usually translate into paint that well.

That's not to say I think one should never paint a person smiling! I think there are all sorts of ways to do this. If the smile is a major identifying factor of a person (and I can think of several people for which that is true) then I could see the smiling expression being a good choice for a portrait. Sargent makes you feel this is true for Mrs. Darley Boit (below, image #1). She looks like a jolly, sociable matron.

I'm starting a portrait right now of someone who is inseparable from her smile, so I've decided to try and catch it in the moment of becoming, rather than fully blossomed. We shall see. . .!

Rather "thirteen" than "cheese"
 

I'll look forward to see it. :)

I believe that it is important to show that the model knows why he is smiling, there must be a correspondence between the eyes and the mouth that shows why the model is smiling, or rather, that he know it himself !!

Some years ago now, when I thought it was time to paint a portrait of my daughter, I was constrained by the fact that I was living in Taipei and she was visiting for but a few days, none of which she'd booked for sitting for a portrait by her dad. I did pencil and paint sketches and then turned to capturing photo references, and I kept trying to get her into "poses" in which she didn't show teeth. But the fact was, she's a person who is either always smiling or who, in the course of her natural conversational animation, is never close-mouthed. I tried to get her to settle into a close-lipped pose and she finally protested. "Dad! You can't ever NOT see my teeth! You can't not paint my teeth."

And it was so, and she was right, and for me to insist otherwise would have been foolish and would have itself produced a "fake" image, because in my child's exuberance, a smile is natural, as is the animation with which she greets everyone and everything. (Bottle that, and you're a millionaire.)

Wish I could say I did it best, but Chris Saper did. Her version is on her website.

Thanks, thoughts, question from a newcomer
 

Thanks so much to all of you for the images and thoughts you

Anne,

As a fan of your blog, I love what you're doing and I don't mind if you take things that I say on the forum threads and quote them in your blog, provided I know what you are quoting first! So I think it is best to ask permission of each artist, each time.

Maybe you should also ask permission of Cynthia Daniel first; after all, she owns the SOG site and forum.

With the exception of certain sections, all threads can be viewed by the public anyway, and people are aware of that when they post here.

I've often thought someone should compile a book on different aspects of portraiture based on quotes from this forum. The topics are endless: composition, backgrounds, colors and color mixing, control of values, facial expressions, value massing, etc! Talk about a lot of work getting permissions from everyone!

That is a tremendous idea!

Serious fora like this one generate (and re-generate) a wealth of practical knowledge. If anyone (or a dedicated group) had the time, energy and perseverence to compile all this kewl stuff into a book, it would be a shame to strangle it by having to get permissions and wrangle over "intellectual property".

Nothing I know about either painting or portraiture is my own - "pat. pend.". At whatever level we find ourselves in our development as portraitists, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. If this idea comes to action, and those sifting the boards for material should find anything I've posted worthwhile enough to add into the compilation, they are freely welcome to it, with or without acknowledging "credit". It's the spirit in which I participate here . . . no strings.

Perhaps a thread could be started where participants would simply indicate their "permission" ?

Great idea! It would sure save a lot of time and effort.

LOL, this is what's great about this forum: two opposite points of view, each having validity, with the supporting arguments supplied - moving toward possible consensus through sharing ideas.

Actually, this etiquette issue came up for me just now because the forum discussion about smiles and teeth is so complete that I felt I hardly had anything to write beyond what's been said here. In the past, my blog posts have expressed my own point of view, with a few supporting ideas and quotes from elsewhere. (I've also used many images by portraitists around the world.) But in the case of my smiles post, I'll probably rely on forum opinion more fully than I've done in the past. That's what made me feel I should check in here to see how people feel about it.

Since I began my blog, I've always contacted artists whose words and/or images I put online. Everyone who has responded has, without exception, been happy to have their images or words used. I imagine this is partly because I only put up words and images that I've learned or gained insight from. I never post other artists work to criticize it. Of course, being written about on a blog gives an artist more exposure. And any new link to their website from another related website tends to boost them in search engines.

I