Go for excellence in portraiture

[Tito Champena]

"Reference photo" is the name for an excuse for painting from a flat surface to another flat surface and then wonder if one has achieved the "likeness". I believe that to achieve a 100% likeness is better to leave the photo alone. Rembrandt had some of his portraits rejected because of not having sufficient "likeness" . Singer Sargent would care less about an absolute "likeness", he painted his sitters taller and beautiful and no sitter got mad at him for not getting the "likeness". If you had seen the actual photos of some of the famous people he painted, you will notice how different they were from his portraits. I do agree that nobody should try to paint realistically if one is not sufficiently skilled with drawing, but this skill should be used to make an artistically beautiful painting and not as a substitute for the camera. Rembrandt and Sargent were skillful enough to have rendered photo-realistic pictures and yet they refused to do so. The goal or objective of a painter should be only one: to get better. To me, the search for perfection had nothing to do with the artist's professional or commercial goals. Whether a painting is beautiful or ugly does not depend on having achieved a likeness or not, but on whether the painting as a whole, inspires emotions on the onlooker or not. Nobody knows how the real Gioconda's wife used to look, because there are no photographs of her, but Leonardo's famous Mona Lisa still overwhelms me.