I saw this portrait of the late actor Heath Ledger
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/s...9-7642,00.html
(which, in truth, looks more like Orlando Bloom), because, having had rather a soft spot for him (my excuse being that it was his acting skills rather than his looks that drew me to him; after all, one of my other favourite Australian actors is Geoffrey Rush), his name in relation to portrait painting caught my eye. I was led, via the usual meandering of internet searches, to another Australian artist, Jiawei Shen, whose portrait of a certain Australian art historian:
http://www.portraitartist.com/shen/blackrobe.htm
sparked an idea about the meaning and intentions of intellectual endeavour. This portrait shows the art historian arrogant, bare-footed and wearing an academic gown. He seems not in the least a brain-in-a-jar academic. His thinking seems to grow out of the seat of his back. His body and mind are not separate, and as a result his bodily and intellectual activities acknowledge and feed / feed off each other.
This boundarilessness gave me the idea that this art historian did not cling to a pre-conceived order (a known philosophical meaning to life). Instead he seems to enter into a state of chaos of random thoughts and ideas, trusting the tendency of chaotic states to resolve themselves eventually into new orders.
Thinking of this happening in the process of painting, the order that one trusts will be achieved is quite profound. It is not the mere stillness of paint marks on canvas once the painter has stopped painting
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