Tag: portrait

A blurry pic of an unfinished portrait of my uncle after Portrait of Pope Innocent X by
Velázquez. I never got a good photo of this one before it went to its new home. Oh well. They might let me visit if lockdown ever ends.

I got a new graphics tablet and having pressure sensitivity is a revelation but it is also very distracting because all I want to do is paint mouths over and over forever and ever.  

Sometimes a painting goes well, sometimes it goes badly. 

This one is not going well. Here’s a record of my attempts thus far to make this lovely model’s face look less like a burst football and more like the girl I know. 

(Oil on canvas, 34"x40")

I’m really bad at portraits. Really bad. I don’t know why. It’s not that I can’t draw faces, I just can’t draw the faces of people I recognise. I’ve discovered that the mental image I have of people I know actually bears very little resemblance to their physical form. If I try to draw someone from memory, I don’t even come close. If I try to draw from a model or a photograph, my preconception of what they look like steamrolls right over what my eyes are telling me. I don’t know why this happens. I cannot shut it off. 

The discrepancies are not huge ones; I don’t give people extra limbs or change their ethnicity or stick a spare ear on or anything. It’s just a combination of tiny oversights and little, subtle alterations that build up into completely the wrong face and it’s really frustrating. 

All this might go some way to explain why I am terrible at remembering faces in daily life. When I’m introduced to someone, my brain accepts their face as a sketch and then doodles all over it and files it away, probably under the wrong name. So when I meet them again, they look only vaguely familiar and I call them the wrong thing. Even if you are ridiculously good-looking, all I will keep is the word “good-looking” as an annotation in the margin. I might have fond memories of things we did or conversations we had but… your face. I just cannot recall your face. 

This is also why stories of love-at-first-sight make me raise an eyebrow. 

The painting above is still a work in progress, with so many things wrong with it I wouldn’t know where to begin.

These two were specifically made for the “Queer as Political” exhibition currently running at The Other Place in Cork city. Til now, I’ve really never made explicitly political work, but for once I have something I want to say out loud.

“Corrective rape” is the nauseating term given to the targeted rape of lesbians by men who seek to punish those women for their sexuality. It is currently rife in South Africa, despite a progressive legal constitution that even permits same-sex marriage. Noxolo Nogwaza (24) and Eudy Simelane (31) were each gang-raped, mutilated, stabbed and beaten to death for being gay and speaking openly in defence of gay rights. There have been many others.

Irish society, meanwhile, is comparatively liberal but still unequal. Women and lesbians are still taught the message that their bodies are not their own; that their desires and choices are not valid unless they conform to restrictive notions of femininity. I’m struggling to find a way to speak coherently about the misogynistic, homophobic influences that still permeate our supposedly liberal society but the idea behind these two paintings was to express this basic message: that if you think casual sexism or anti-gay slurs are harmless, you’re just not thinking. Read about what happens when you take this attitude to its logical extreme and consider whether you mind that you’re a part of the problem.

Correction 1 (Double Portrait) and Correction 2: Both pieces watercolour/mixed media on paper, 16×20".

For more information about the deaths of Noxolo and Eudy, try here and here. 

My fixation on explorers may be wearing off. Still, this began as a fairly detailed portrait of a young Ernest Shackleton. But I’m really not comfortable with portraits – it feels rude, like staring directly into a stranger’s eyes for far too long. So I suppose I started pushing him back, under layers of hectic colour, til his face was almost completely abstracted. 

Acrylic on canvas, 16"x20".

My love of explorers isn’t completely pure; it’s not a sincere admiration of their achievements. It’s really a fascination with the contrast between their near-superhuman accomplishments and their painfully ordinary weaknesses. Like Shackleton: hailed as an heroic leader for keeping his team going in horrible circumstances, but chose men to join his polar expeditions on the basis that he ‘liked the look of them’ rather than their technical skills. Set various records and was awarded a knighthood for his explorations, but was obsessed with money and attempted many unsuccessful business schemes, including a run of collectible Antarctic-themed postage stamps. Had a serious heart condition but repeatedly refused treatment, even getting into an argument with his doctor about changing his lifestyle minutes before suffering a fatal heart attack.