Do your features and personality come out in your paintings of others?

[Richard Bingham]

Geez Sharon . . . cop-out! How about a scad of quotes from painters pontificating on poetry? (ha ha ha)

What a fun topic. I find oftimes sitters have aspects of their physicality reminiscent of my family members or my close friends. If I'm not careful, they begin resembling "Uncle George" perhaps more than the sitter really does in actuality. Another aspect of this "phenomenon" is that I find certain "facial types" less problematic than others, to strike a quick likeness. I think this owes to a "visual memory" that results from familiarity.

In the case of "current" commissions, I agree it's the sitter who dictates the "importance" of a portrait. Recently, I noted a fair number of portraits of donors hanging in the halls of a local university teaching hospital. With few exceptions, I'm sorry to say, most of 'em were execrable! Yet, there they hang, the "importance" attached to them being the fact that they bear testimony of the sitters' largesse. Very soon, (but not soon enough) they'll be pitched into the dustbin of history, where they belong. The worthiness of any painting is intrinsic, regardless of the subject matter, so ultimately it will be incidental who the sitter was . . . if the painting is any good at all. The identity of many of Rembrandt's sitters are unknown.

[Tom Edgerton]

"Do your features and personality come out in your paintings of others? "

God, I hope not, for their sakes.

Secretly, though, I know Sharon's right. Love the quotes, especially the one from Samuel Johnson. It's why I'm a portrait painter.

--TE

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Thanks for all your comments. I agree that each painting is autobiographical. How can it not be? A person can only surmise the character of someone or something who is is not him or herself. However well you think you know someone, and how accurately you try and portray the personality and the features, it is really just something created in your imagination from what you recognize about yourself in that person. Unless you acquire the gift of mind-reading, then you cannot extricate the idea of what another person is from what you understand yourself to be. In other words, it only your experience of being yourself - living your emotions, behaviour, features etc. - that informs you of the characteristics that make up someone else. And, in addition, I believe that everyone is probably essentially narcissistic, and so things about the other person or thing that do not relate, and thus are of no interest to oneself, will not be noticed. Thus, at the very least, the selections an artist makes of what to put in a painting and what is left out are more revealing of the character of the artist much more than the sitter.