Each one is based on a real person whom she has met and photographed. Is a portrait also defined by the intent of the viewer? Since 1945, senior CIPA member Dorothy Oxborough has been creating pastel portraits of aboriginal people, mostly children and elders. But if the artist’s intent is not to produce a portrait… we need to take that seriously.” ![]() “Even composite sculptures or paintings, which are of no one real person, can be on a spiritual level a sort of portrait. “One needs to take very seriously the artist’s intent,” comments Hall. In either case, there’s no denying the overwhelming sense of presence one feels standing before these powerful ‘personalities.’ Penny’s artistic purpose, however, goes far beyond the creation of likeness, forcing us to contemplate our understanding of what is real, and unravel what it is we call identity. Some present the particular features of a real-life sitter while others exist as fictional composites of human beings. So does the person portrayed actually need to exist?Īs part of his body of work, Evan Penny creates meticulously detailed oversized sculptures and photographs of human figures. Certainly, the subject doesn’t need to be identified for a piece to qualify as a portrait. Figurative work, on the other hand, is done for a different purpose – a study of form, a representation of archetypal images such as the nude. With a portrait, you get a sense of a specific personality. “Portraiture says something about the person represented we get caught up in a relationship.” “The painter has introduced you to someone – if you are engaged, and feel close to that individual… then yes it is a portrait,” says Poulin. And that becomes part of what distinguishes portraiture from figurative artwork. We ‘get it’ when the portraitist offers us the chance to engage in a relationship with the subject of a portrait. Against the backdrop of 20th century psychoanalysis, we have a concept of individuality that wasn’t around before. Now we see people as complex, victimized, realized, analyzed and unique. Portraiture has evolved along with that,” says Poulin. “Later, as professions emerged, what you did was important. It was the King that was important, not the Henry. Portraiture in past centuries was all about what you were, notes Bernard Poulin, president of CIPA. For one thing, the artist in that case wasn’t dabbing at Henry’s soul. But do we imagine King Henry VIII shedding a tear when his painted visage was unveiled to him? “It is profound to see yourself in that glow.” “The piece of art – the painting – has an energy about it that captures soul and beauty,” says Hall. “He is a painter himself, yet he had underestimated the affect that seeing himself in a painting would have. When the subject of her winning piece first saw his portrait, it was a profound moment of looking, says Hall. “Lots of quiet tears.” Hall won an Award of Distinction and the Swinton Award for best oil portrait at the 2004 National Open Portrait Exhibition, presented by the Canadian Institute of Portrait Artists (CIPA) last fall. “I always get an emotional reaction when I show people their finished portrait,” says painter Janine Hall. In a couple of days he returned, at peace, sincerely grateful for the painting she’d done. The sketch was how he saw himself.” She asked him to take the portrait home and think about it. He’d looked at it frequently over the years, and never looked at the photo. “He had expected me to work from the sketch. “When I showed him the portrait, he didn’t want it,” she recalls. Naturally, Petricevic referred to the photo for his likeness. Defiant.Ĭalgary artist Marija Petricevic tells the story of an elderly client who brought a photograph of his younger self as well as a decades-old sketch depicting him in full military garb. We hand our souls over to an artist whose very existence pivots on his or her powers of observation, whose talent is the ability to look at you, to reach in and pull something definitive out. But when we sit before a portrait artist, there’s a transfer of power that is frighteningly absolute. ![]() Snapshots we know are unconscionable liars. The portrait in all of us lurks behind a lifesize cut-out that is our self-perception – the way we see ourselves the way we think we look, perhaps the way we are. ![]() Was she busy? Or was she simply inclined to put off an experience so weighty with historical significance, so daunting in its potential to penetrate one’s protective façade? Portrait painters today aim to capture the essence of an individual.įormer Prime Minister Kim Campbell waited 11 years to get her official prime ministerial portrait done – it was finally unveiled in Parliament last November.
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