I’ve recently started contributing to the University of Texas at Austin’s visual rhetoric website, viz. You can check it out at:
“Danie Mellor: Environmental and socio-historical ideas in fine art”
“Introduction: Seeking logos in fine art”
While you’re there, take a look around viz. for more fascinating content, especially on science in art.
This is Part 2 of the description of a creative process. To read it in chronological order, please read Part 1 first.
At the end of my last post, I presented icons and Russian folktale illustrations each of which had a central image framed with secondary images that added to its meaning. Below is a detail of the center panel of my triptych The Most Exposed Terrain on Earth. It shows the way in which I used the image-frame technique to help resolve my own challenge: to convey the endlessness of the flat Russian steppes, 3,500 miles wide.
Detail: Center panel of triptych The Most Exposed Terrain on Earth
My frame is a collage of landscapes by 19th century Russian painters. These painters were collectively known as the Peredvizhniki (usually translated into English as either the Wanderers or the Itinerants). Many of their most famous works portray the Russian steppes. Through the repetition of these beautiful images of the land, I hoped to help convey the vastness of Russia’s flatness.
There is a deeper emotional level to this collage than the purely informational one. The Peredvizhniki may not be household names in the US, but they certainly are in Russia. They are to Russian art what the great Russian novelists are to the country’s literature. The Peredvizhniki are profoundly Russian. They are of the land. The Russian people feel their work deeply, and identify with it. These paintings hold all the love and sorrow and suffering of the Russian people over the long course of their history.
Detail, center panel, The Most Exposed Terrain on Earth
My own goal as well with Playground of the Autocrats is to embrace all the aspects of human life: knowledge, pain, joy, satire, humor, suffering. Close examination of many of the figures in the crowd scenes in Playground reveal attention to the many sides of human experience.
I’ve never been able to understand why the Peredvizhniki aren’t better known in the United States. Some of their paintings were shown in the Guggenheim’s Russia! exhibit several years ago. And there’s a wonderful book by Mikhail Guerman, The Russian Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. But on the whole, the Peredvizhniki are much less known here than are the European Impressionists. My use of their paintings in my frame is my homage to their greatness.
In my next post, I’ll get to the music and lyrics of Playground of the Autocrats.
In “Escaping Flatland,” Edward Tufte describes the challenge faced by people who work in the field of visualizing complex information. These designers invent ingenious ways of portraying multi-dimensional data on the “flatlands of paper and video screens.”
My challenge in the first triptych of Playground of the Autocrats was the same, with a twist. I needed to find a way of depicting 3,500 miles of flat land within the dimensions of my 24″ x 48″ triptych.
Painting a single, particular view of the Russian steppes would not have been so problematic. Many artists have done it magnificently. But what I wanted to convey was that there are 3,500 miles of steppes, and that nowhere else on earth does such a vast open landscape exist. It was a lot of information to visualize in one relatively small artwork!
Maps, of course are one excellent way of conveying information about large areas of terrain. As you may have gathered from my last post, I love relief maps! I included a relief “globe” in my character design for Ivan the Terrible (one of Stalin’s fairy godfathers in Playground of the Autocrats). Ivan is on top of the world, dancing on his playground.
Ivan the Terrible on top of the world
I superimposed the caption “The Nomad Express: 3,500 open miles” across Russia. And I added arrows that marked the Mongol invasions across the vast open land.
Playground of the Autocrat's globe
In addition, I wanted to layer in a more evocative portrayal of the vastness of Russia’s territory. Along with the map’s analytic information, I wanted to give the viewer a feeling of what it was to live in that wide-open, vulnerable landscape.
My animation script of Playground of the Autocrats had included a sequence of the Russian land as a reclining Mother Russia. As the lascivious godfather Ivan the Terrible conceived it, she was a peasant woman exposed to “rape by barbarian tribes.” Someday, when an animated version of Playground is realized, I think this will be a terrific sequence, as the terrain morphs into a 3,500-mile-long woman in Ivan’s imagination. But when I tried to create the image in a still form, it became too complex. Maybe I’ll tackle that route in another triptych.
Meanwhile, I had thought of another way of visualizing the endless Russian steppes. I drew on another centuries-old technique: many icons’ main images are surrounded by a frame of smaller images that convey additional information. Icons and religious art in general were the way Bible stories were communicated to illiterate populations. Hence, they are a wonderful model for how we can visualize information today.  (The famous art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote a revered book about illustration of religious texts, called Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language.)
Icons with borders of additional images
Russian folktale illustration, most notably perhaps the renowned Ivan Bilibin, followed in this tradition. Bilibin loaded up his borders with wonderful supplementary images that enhance the feeling of the central drawing, if not adding to the story. In the example on the right, the main illustration has a full-color border, while the surrounding text has a sepia-toned border with yet more fantastic, complex drawings.
Ivan Bilibin illustrations with borders of additional images
In my next post, I’ll describe how I utilized the borders of “The Most Exposed Terrain on Earth” in this tradition. You can read that post here.
Playground of the Autocrats Triptych 1: The Most Exposed Terrain on Earth
I named my series of triptychs Playground of the Autocrats in part because a playground is typically flat. Sure, there are vertical structures built on it. But the ground itself is usually flat, providing unhindered opportunity to play.
The foundation of Russian society was literally its ground: the endless, flat Russian steppes. I feel we often don’t give enough consideration to the ways in which different landscapes can shape the societies that live on them. We’re all aware that given natural resources are available only in particular geographic areas. Given crops can grow only in certain latitudes. Rivers facilitate travel. Coastlines and good harbors present opportunities that don’t exist for landlocked countries.
Beyond that, though, the very shape of the landscape can have a profound impact on how people live on it. We see this most easily in extreme landscapes. In the eons before motorized transportation, extremely rugged mountains often produced uncohesive social systems made up of very independent subunits. When it’s hard to get to the neighboring village because there are steep ravines and cliffs between you, there will be less communication and joint activity than if the intervening ground were flat.
Mountains also form barriers that protect against enemies. For most of human history - before we had motorized vehicles and airplanes - a high mountain chain made it very hard to get your army up and over to attack people on the other side. Even today, we see the impact of rugged terrain in Afghanistan: it has defeated many modern foreign armies that have sought to control it.
Throughout history, armies have chosen the highest points in the landscape for their forts and castles. Think the ubiquitous Italian hilltop castles. Think Masada. Think Dracula’s Bram Castle.
In the millenia before airplanes, the highest point in a landscape enabled inhabitants to see the approach of invaders from far off. The enemy would have a hard time trying to climb up a cliff to attack people ensconced above. Heights gave gravitational advantage to the residents whose arrows and hot oil could gather momentum falling downward, while the enemies’ arrows had to fight gravity on their way up.
At the other extreme, what about countries where the land is completely flat? What if you had no mountains forming a protective barrier around your country? What if there were no high cliffs to build your forts atop?  In those cases, the inhabitants had to devote great energy and resources to coming up with other means of defense.
Of course there have been many castles and forts built all over the world on level ground when there was no other choice. This high-ground thing is a matter of degree, not absolutes. But in general terms, a vast, flat landscape was harder to defend than a mountainous one.
And if we look at relief maps of the world, we can easily see that Russia encompasses by far the largest flat expanse on earth: 3500 miles of open land.
In case you doubt this particular relief portrayal, here’s a different one:
And another:
Westerners often mistakenly think the Urals formed a barrier protecting European Russia. But in fact the Urals are for the most part low and easily-traversed. In addition, their southern end peters out in the open steppes: it’s easy to enter European Russia via the steppes at the southern end.
I believe that the openness of Russia’s terrain has had a profound impact on its development of a highly centralized state, beginning with the traumatic 13th century Mongol invasion and centuries-long occupation. I’ll talk more about the reasons why in another post.
My character design for Peter the Great
I originally created Playground of the Autocrats as a script for an animated short film. But because I think and paint in a lot of detail, I decided to realize Playground first as a series of still, mixed media works.
The main characters of the Playground animation script were the infant Joseph Stalin and his fairy godfathers, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Each godfather gave their baby godson Stalin a gift from the past. (I’ll write more on the historical significance of the godfathers’ gifts in a later post.)
The first step in creating either the still or animated Playground of the Autocrats was to design the main characters. These characters appear throughout the series of triptychs.
I turned first to the design of one of Stalin’s godfathers, Peter the Great, of whom there are a number of easily-available portraits.
Portraits of Peter the Great
All these suits of armor were useful to me as models for dressing my Peter character. But let’s face it: none of the these portraits are playful enough for Playground. I needed more visual ideas. I soon found them in two sources. One is an actual statue of Peter the Great on the Moscow River (apparently one of the largest sculptures in the world).
This statue was great inspiration in part because of its over-the-top design, with curly-cue waves and all those ships’ hulls sticking out of the base. In addition, it has the odd incongruity of scale that’s always great in animation: Peter is huge compared to the size of the ship. That also helped me solve another design issue. Since Playground’s Peter plays the role of a fairy godfather, I needed to invent an imaginative way for him to fly. The statue’s ship propped up in the air made me think of a flying ship operated by Peter at its helm.
The second seminal source for my Peter design was a very unusual drawing of Peter’s face as an overweight older man.
This sly, mature image was much more interesting for an animated character than all the heroic portrayals of Peter in his formal portraits. I used this head as my model, with a body inspired by the formal portraits.
Somewhere in this process, I tried an idea that I later discarded. I thought I might have Peter levitate his ship via a propeller on his head. A propeller would fit with Peter’s tremendous interest in the advanced technology of his time, including his lengthy incognito trip around Europe when he worked in ship yards to learn all he could about modern ship building.
I spent a bunch of time looking at images of propellers, to figure out which type would be good for Peter’s head: a corkscrew propeller like one DaVinci drew?
DaVinci's corkscrew propeller
Or if it had prongs, how many should there be? Two? Three? Four? Five?
Ultimately I decided a propeller wasn’t going to have enough heft to lift the ship. Or enough gravitas for a Peter the Great, even one playing the part of a flying godfather in an animated satire.
I considered giving Peter gigantic wings to lift his ship. But what would his wings be made of? What would make them unique to Peter?
Because Peter the Great is so identified with shipbuilding and the military successes of his Navy, I began looking through endless images of 18th century Russian sailing ships. Suddenly it occurred to me that Peter’s wings would be made like a ship’s rigging: of masts, sails, and ropes. After all, sails move ships through the air, as wings propel birds through it. I collaged together a pair of flappers for Peter in a process that took me a good two or three weeks to complete.
Now I needed a way to allow Peter to control his wings, to turn his sails into the wind at angles that would keep his ship moving through the air. I needed gears, cranks, and other mechanics that would look like they came from Peter’s time. I searched a long time without finding anything to fit the bill.
Antique coffee grinder
Finally I found it! It’s a fabulous antique coffee grinder on a wrought iron pedastal. With adjustments, this contraption could allow Peter to control the rigging of his wing-sails with his hands. More searching led me at long last to a wonderful antique crank with hooks that Peter’s rigging ropes could pass through.
Antique crank with hooks
The cylinder turned by the crank shaft could wind up Peter’s rigging just fine!
Peter’s character design was now complete (see images of finished design above and below). And my flying Peter the Great is happily one element of what the New York Times review of Nan Rosenthal’s Katonah Art Museum exhibit described as “wonderful goodies:”
“Several artists pay homage to Joseph Cornell, the early-20th-century American Surrealist-inspired artist and sculptor, and one of the pioneers of assemblage. Among the best of them are Ann Ladd Ferencz, Nina Bentley, Anne Bobroff-Hajal and Erin Walrath, all of whom make boxlike constructions filled with wonderful goodies.”
Detail of my Peter the Great character design
Playground of the Autocrats is a series of triptychs that I’ve been quietly working on in my own time, behind the scenes, for the last 4 or 5 years. These mixed media triptychs are influenced by a combination of art animation and Russian history, icons, and folktale illustration. I consider them fine art, but until recently, I wasn’t sure whether anyone else would. However, one of the series, individually titled Home Security at Any Crazy Price, was selected by Nan Rosenthal for a political art exhibit she curated in early 2009, “Contemporary Confrontations,†at the Katonah Art Museum in Westchester County, just north of New York City. The New York Times review of the show referred to my “Home Security” as an “homage to Joseph Cornell…filled with wonderful goodies.” So I now have Rosenthal’s and the Times’ official stamp that this work is indeed fine art….
Playground of the Autocrats involves a degree of detail that is probably more obsessional than I would like to admit. Each triptch has taken a good two years or so to complete. This is partly because they contain so many figures and other details, each of which is intensively researched. For example, as my models for the peasants I painted in Home Security’s center panel, I used photos of actual 19th century Russian peasants that I found via a lot of searching on the internet and in my old Russian history books. The military figures I painted are based on popular books on Russian military history, whose illustrations have in turn been researched by the authors and artists.
As for the Playground of the Autocrats characters (Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and next Catherine the Great) who appear in each triptych, I carefully designed and collaged them together from odds and ends reflecting their true historical actions and times. I’ve endlessly worked over each verse of the lyrics they sing with the aid of my beloved Rhyming Dictionary by Rosalind Fergusson (the only rhyming dictionary organized to work the same way my brain does).
Why do all this? one might ask. Sometimes I wonder myself. But the answer is that this is simply who I am as an artist.
Still, preparing to launch this thread, I started searching around the internet trying to figure out which blogging category Playground of the Autocrats fits into best. Is what I’m doing conceptual art? Is it political art? But my goal isn’t to push a particular political agenda. I’m mainly interested in visualizing my ideas about social systems, Russia’s in particular, in a fun, whimsical, and moving way (I’ll make you laugh, I’ll make you cry).
So maybe what I do is more akin to political cartoons? But my highly detailed work, designed to be gazed at for a long time, is different from political cartoons’ brilliant, quickly-readable commentary on single contemporary events. My work is about historical developments over the very long haul – centuries, not days. While I adore clever political cartoons, that’s not really what I’m doing.
Maybe I do something closer to comics or graphic novels? But I don’t have any page-turning! And my work – though it’s quirky and (I hope) humorous – is more academically-minded. So am I into something like information visualization? Hmmm. While I’m captivated by the likes of Edward Tufte, I’m creating art, not social science. Above all, my goal is to evoke emotional and esthetic responses as well as thinking ones.
In short, I don’t seem to fit into any single art or blog category. But I sure touch on a lot of them, many of which I find enthralling. I will refer to all in posts to come.
When the portraitist begins by focusing simply on the subject’s surface image, of course the tendency is to place it front and center. When one begins by thinking about the subject’s other qualities and other objects central to his or her life, a more complex composition may naturally evolve.
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In the Comments following my blog entry “Portrait Composition: Old World vs. New?†portraitist Alexandra Tyng provided a link to a portraitartist.com forum description of her process in painting her mother, the architect Anne Tyng (see Comments below).  I followed up with a further question to Tyng on the portraitartist.com forum (not accessible to the general public). My question related to both her portrait of her mother and that of the artist Edna Andrade:
“How did you make the decision to include an element that would necessitate placing the subject’s head relatively low on the canvas, with the element extending substantially above the head?â€
Portraits of Anne Tyng and Edna Andrade, by Alexandra Tyng. See earlier post for larger image.
Tyng wrote such an interesting response that I asked her permission to quote it here. She agreed. Here it is:
“To answer your question, I don’t ever think, ‘I’m going to try a portrait with the head placed lower in the composition.’ The placement of the figure comes about on an individual basis, and is a direct result of what I want to say in that particular portrait.
“In the portrait of my mother [an architect], I wanted to emphasize that she is a very small woman with large (great) ideas. I started imagining what a portrait of her would look like, and ideas came to me. She always made a lot of geometrical models that hung from the ceiling of her studio. She also designed some unbuilt structures, my favorite being the Philadelphia city tower project. I played around with ways to arrange these elements in the composition, which led to deciding on the dimensions and size and placement of her figure.
“With the portrait of Edna Andrade, it just naturally happened that she had a very large painting in her living room that I wanted to use for a background. To give a sense of the size and impact of the painting I needed to move it close to the picture plane. She had Victorian furniture (inherited from family) whose shapes echoed the shapes in the painting, and I thought it was an interesting play between her traditional Southern background and her very contemporary work. She wanted to be seated in the portrait so it just worked out that way. The way I arrange compositions is mostly intuitive. A lot of times I see something that will work, that says what I want to say. There are limitless possibilities for placing the figure in a composition.â€
I felt it was instructive that Tyng started the process of determining the composition for these portraits by thinking through the more abstract qualities of her subjects, not just their physical appearance. I suspect many portrait artists – myself included - tend to begin with the surface image of the subject, rather than right-brain associations with other qualities of the subject - the small woman with great ideas building models she hangs from her studio ceiling. When the portraitist begins by focusing simply on the subject’s surface image, of course the tendency is to place it front and center. When one begins by thinking about the subject’s other qualities and other objects central to his or her life, a more complex composition may naturally evolve.
For Edna Andrade’s portrait, Tyng began with shape components first – their similarity in the modern painting in the background and Andrade’s Victorian furniture. This then became a reference to the more abstract qualities of Andrade’s traditional Southern background and her very contemporary style of painting. The complex associations between shapes generated a wonderful composition and portrait.
Portrait of Olivia by Judith Dickinson. See post below for larger image and discussion of painting.
After posting my last blog entry, I emailed Judith Dickinson, who I’d never met or talked to before. I asked her how she had decided to include the large empty space around Olivia, the little girl whose portrait I analyzed in “Expression of emotions” (scroll down to my previous post).
Judith emailed back such a perfect description of her intent in the painting that I asked her permission to add it here, which she readily gave. What she wrote to me expresses clearly and easily what I had struggled to find words for:
“I wanted to convey this small little girl alone in this long hallway and yet she is not distressed; in fact she is intently and comfortably aware of the bigness of life around her. [I wanted to portray] her courage and peaceful contemplation in such a “lonely” surrounding.”
So the feelings Dickinson sought to convey in Olivia’s portrait were exactly what I received in viewing it. The fact that such emotions are visible even in her small, 72 dpi website image of the painting tells me how successful Dickinson was in conveying what she wanted. She used every element of the portrait - Olivia’s face, body, and clothing, and the overall composition of the painting – to express her meaning.
Interestingly, Dickinson’s painting merges the two subjects I’ve written about in recent posts: the expression of emotion in portraits, and the use of very large space around the subject. The way Olivia relates to the empty hallway around her - her facial expression and the way she holds her body in the space - adds to the emotional impact of the painting.
By the way, looking at the painting again, I’ve realized the importance of the distance between Olivia’s uplifted chin and her hands in expressing her openness to life. While her arms are relaxed, they’re also stretched out as far as possible in pleasure, framing her little torso. The chin, raised as distant as doable from her hands, exposes her torso maximally, leaving her little body entirely, self-confidently open to whatever will come.
“The face is the primary signal system for showing the emotions….â€
Portrait of Mrs. Irondell & granddaughter, by Simmie Knox
Detail of Mrs. Irondell
This spectacular painting by American portraitist Simmie Knox (most famous for painting the official Presidential portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton) is, to me, one of the ultimate role models for the creation of profoundly humanistic portraits. The expression of pride and suppressed merriment in Mrs. Irondell’s face conveys so much more than if she had been painted in a traditional pose gazing into the middle distance.  Her clothing and surroundings express elegance and wealth as well as any more formal portrait, but the look on her face – and that of her mischievous granddaughter – raises this portrait far above the standard pose.
To capture this kind of expression in a painting is no easy matter. To begin with, it’s impossible for a subject to produce an expression like this on demand while an artist paints. I don’t know how Knox created this portrait, but it’s hard to imagine he didn’t look at photographs to help.  (To read my earlier entries on photography, click here.)
In addition to photos, there’s another resource that can help in painting human expression. The human face generates expressions via many different muscles functioning together under the particular flesh of each person. So for an artist to paint expressions, it’s important to have a working knowledge of the basic facial movements that create them.
Because my own central aspiration in portraiture is to learn ever more about how to fully convey human expression, I’ve relied on THE ARTIST’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO FACIAL EXPRESSION, by Gary Faigin.  This book analyses the myriad movements of facial muscles which construct the expressions we recognize as joy, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and various nuances of these emotions. In a future blog post, I’ll describe the crucial role Faigin’s book played, for example, when I faced the challenge of painting an impish little boy based on a terribly over-exposed family photograph.
In addition to my trusty copy of Faigin, my daughter Nastassia Hajal, a Ph. D. student in Child Clinical Psychology at Penn State, recently introduced me to another book about facial expression: UNMASKING THE FACE, A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING EMOTIONS FROM FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen. It’s used by psychologists researching e. g. mothers’ emotional responses to their babies. (I later discovered that Faigin himself had utilized Ekman and Friesen’s work in his ARTIST’S COMPLETE GUIDE.) Ekman and Friesen’s roughly 45 years of research on human expression have been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.
But why should portraitists bother studying movements of muscle or flesh or anything else? Isn’t portraiture about stillness? Don’t portraitists almost always paint their subjects in repose, sitting as motionless as humanly possible for the painter? Why not leave facial expression to other kinds of artists who deal with that sort of thing?
My emphasis on human expression in portraiture is not the traditional view, nor is it widely accepted today as the primary goal of portraiture. Much of the accepted “wisdom†about expressionless portrait subjects is based on our collective image of a person posing immobile for hours while an artist paints them - an image which is no longer generally true because most portraitists nowadays work from photographs.  But one way or another, there are portraits created which - like the ones we will look at below - capture uniquely wonderful facial expressions.
To me, the most miraculous aspect of the individual human face isn’t its surface appearance, but its capacity to convey true human emotion as nothing else can – not words, not any other part of the body. Ekman and Friesen note that many professionals such as trial lawyers must learn to focus on visual signals from the face because words can lie while faces usually cannot.
Both facial expression and words, wrote Ekman and Friesen, are used for communicating information among people.
“Words are best for most messages, particularly factual ones. If you are trying to tell someone where the museum is, who played the lead in that movie, whether you are hungry, or how much the meal costs, you use words….
“Words can also be used to describe feelings….  Here, however, the advantage is with the visual channel, because the rapid facial signals are the primary system for expression of emotions. It is the face you search to know whether some one is angry, disgusted, afraid, sad, etc. Words cannot always describe the feelings people have….  If some one tells you…he is angry and shows no evidence facially, you are suspicious. If the reverse occurs and he looks angry but doesn’t mention anger feelings in his words, you doubt the words but not the anger.” (18)
If emotion is better expressed visually than through words, how about the rest of the human body? Do we see emotion expressed through movements of the body’s muscles?
Ekman and Friesen’s research shows that emotions “are shown primarily in the face, not in the body. The body instead shows how people are coping with emotion.â€Â The body might be tense, constrained, withdrawn; it may attack physically. But none of these body postures are unique to particular emotions. Ekman and Friesen wrote, “The face is the key for understanding people’s emotional expression, and it is sufficiently important, complicated, and subtle to require a book to itself.â€Â (7)
Well, if facial expression is the primary locus of the most truthful emotional communication among people, shouldn’t it be the territory of portraitists?  The human face is our turf! Now that photos help make it possible to paint fleeting expressions, we portraitists can move into this territory and stake our claim to it. The face holds the key to the highest peak of human experience. Why should portraitists - specialists in the face - cede its expression to other artists?
Now that I’ve vented on that subject, let’s see what insights Ekman and Friesen give us into Knox’s portrait. Here is is again:
What do the body positions of each subject in Knox’s portrait convey about how they will handle the emotion expressed in their faces? As we’ve said, Mrs. Irondell’s face conveys delight and pride, a sense of fulfillment in a life well lived. And what does her body tell us she will do about those emotions? Well, her arms quietly dominate the chair as they rest there.  And her completely relaxed, non-erect body posture tells us she’s not going to do – doesn’t have to do – a damn thing but enjoy herself!  This relaxed yet dominant body posture conveys a sense of life achievement as much as do her rich surroundings and expensive clothes.
Her granddaughter doesn’t yet dominate the piece of furniture she rests her arm on - it’s almost bigger than she is. But her mischievousness as she hides behind her grandmother clearly dominates Mrs. Irondell’s heart. The smile on the little girl’s face tells us she’s having fun sneaking up behind her grandmother. Mrs. Irondell is having a ball knowing perfectly well she’s there. The two people are fully aware of each other, able to relate intensely even though they aren’t facing, because they know each other so well. (Their close relationship is conveyed also by their hats, identical except for color.)
In this painting, Knox has captured expressions that may be fleeting, but in so doing, he has expressed the profound essence of the relationship between Mrs. Irondell and her granddaughter.
Let’s look at another portrait, this one by Colorado portraitist Judith Dickinson, which also captures a delightful facial expression combined with unique body posture.
Portrait of Olivia, by Judith Dickinson
Detail of Olivia by Judith Dickinson
This is one of the most charming portraits I’ve ever seen of a child. It captures something deeply true about childhood. The little girl’s eyes are somehow both dreamy and alert. Her chin is tilted up with gentle expectation and an unassuming sense that good things are ahead in her life.
What can we read in Olivia’s body about what she will do about the emotional expectations we see in her face? The very specific position of her arms, hands, and body gives me the sense that she has just sighed with contentment before settling into this pose. She is very relaxed, suggesting that she will move at her own pace and in her own time toward life’s pleasures. She is oblivious to the fact that her pretty dress is slightly twisted, in the way all children’s clothing is. Her feet don’t reach the ground, but she’s not wriggling to get them there.
(And harking back to my earlier post, Portrait Composition: Old World vs. New? - click here - the use of empty space above and beside the little girl adds tremendously to the feeling both of her smallness in the world, and of her sense that good things will come in their own time. They aren’t here yet - the space is empty for now - but her relaxed expectation tells us she feels they will come and make her life good.)
Portrait of Dean of Women Students, University College Dublin, by Conor Walton
Even official portraits can have wonderful facial expression. In this portrait of Carmel O’Sullivan, Dean of Women Students at University College Dublin, the face radiates intelligent warmth. The twinkle in O’Sullivan’s eyes makes me feel she’s the adult I’d want turn to if I were a student with a problem. One could imagine no better quality than this in a portrait of a college dean.
What is O’Sullivan’s body showing about how she will deal with the emotion her face exudes? She is opening the door into her office, welcoming us in. Facing us all the while in her cheery outfit, she’s alert and ready to help. She’s holding a couple of books in her hand, including one about Rembrandt, conveying the sense that she will bring intellect and culture to bear.
To me, this painting expresses so much more about the relationships this Dean has with her students and peers than would a formal portrait in a traditional official pose.
Below are several more portraits that accomplish beautifully the portrayal of unique personal facial expression. You can click on any image to see a larger version on the artist’s website. I’ll leave the fun of analyzing these to you!
For myself, I hope that looking at these unusual and very special examples will help me learn to portray ever more complex and singular expressions in my own paintings.
Portrait of Buster Navins, by Richard Whitney
Portrait of Ann, Countess of Yarborough, by John Ward
Portrait of Jordan, by Susan Strauss
Portrait of Olivia and Oscar, by Paul Brason, Royal Society of Portrait Painters