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1. INTRODUCTION           

A Faceless Portrait?

What is a Portrait?

 

“Is it a preconception derived from habit to suppose that the soul and the heart are in the same category and can only be negotiated through the face? Isn’t it common to find a single book or poem or record that communicates with the heart more profoundly than a hundred years of scanning faces?” Kobe Abe “The Face of Another”

 

And yet, as I think of the portraits I have created and will create in the future, I always begin with imagining the face. Certainly it is to the face, throughout the history of man as artist, that we have given that singular distinction – it is the one thing above all others that we assume encapsulates our essential identity.

 

And yet, as Kobe Abe so eloquently states in the quote above, there is so much more that we could be looking to in order to discover where resides and where could be revealed our ‘essential’ natures.

For instance, on a simple level, we could look to the body that supports the face, the body’s movement as well as the space and sounds it inhabits. We could also look, as Abe suggests, to the works of an individual, the creative fingerprint; we could look to medical science to see another form of portrait – our actual fingerprints, our DNA.

 

So I ask -

Does a portrait have to have a face?

 

I suspect we are all voyeurs; I know I am. We have an endless fascination with watching the expressions of the other. As new born babies, our eyes are constantly drawn to the face of the mother; as children, the first figures we draw are usually stick bodies with oversized faces, and even these faces, primitive as they are, have expression; as adults we overtly and covertly catch glimpses or ourselves and others in mirrors, plate glass, shop fronts. We watch each other in public places - on buses, in the car beside us at the traffic lights, at parties and pubs. Facebook with it’s billions of portraits, both of others and the ‘selfie’ is an unavoidable part of modern life; so much so that we have needed to enact legislation to protect others from the umbiquitous  ‘selfie stick’.

 

And the remarkable thing is, in all faces, there is something to intrigue us, to inform us, whether accurately or not, to spike the imagination.

 

The rendered face can represent something intangible, something ‘captured’ even; as primitive cultures feared when first seeing their faces represented in photographs. They believed their souls were trapped in the photographic portrait. Ancient Egyptians saw portraits of the dead as holders of the living soul that could ferry their subjects into the next world. The image captured in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is powerful enough to redraw him and ultimately destroy him.  (I can only bemoan ‘if only it were that simple for a portrait artist to truly capture the inner spirit, soul or psyche of their subject’!!)

 

And yet, something important is most definitely captured in the portrait of a face. Roland Barthes calls it ‘the air’

 

“The air is not a schematic, an intellectual datum, the way a silhouette is. Nor is the air a simple analogy as in “likeness”. No, the air is that exhorbitant thing which induces from body to soul – animula, the little individual soul…” Camera Lucida, 1981. Pg 109

 

So, the question is "can we capture a person’s ‘air’ via something other than a face"?

 

"Self Portrait with Violinist" 2009

For instance, is a title enough to define a portrait?

 

“Portrait of Joan” immediately says to me this is a portrait of Joan; I don’t know Joan but I believe this is a representation of her if the artist says it is. As Barthe contends, text can act as an anchor to meaning a “parasitic message designed to connate the image” (Barthes, 1977, pg 25) and this is certainly what a title can do in defining a portrait, even if there is no recognisable face.

“Portrait of a Woman” or even “Portrait of a Grecian Urn” tells me immediately that this is a portrait of sorts.

 

The question here I pose; is this a self portrait of Carla? There is no face and yet, it tells many things about the subject. The most immediate observation – it is called “Self Portrait with Violinist” and she is filming herself and a violinist in a mirror; the room and the subjects are casual, dischevelled even, with a sense of early morning light through the window, suggesting intimacy. It’s not a lot we learn, but as much as many portraits with a face –she is a filmmaker with intimate knowledge of music and a violinist.

Following on from this broader definition, is sound and/or music created specifically to evoke and illustrate an individual, enough to capture a person’s ‘air’ and therefore can be considered a portrait? My contention will be that it is, particularly if part of that sound are words or text that capture the narrative of an individual.

 

While I’m inclined to agree with Marcia Pointon when she says “above all it is the face that is understood to define portraiture” (2013, pg 7) I would add, as she does herself “the question of making a likeness is the beginning and not an end to a work of portraiture” (2013, pg 19)

 

Pointon goes on to discuss the historical definitions of portrayal. She says a portrait historically was defined as “a representation of any human subject, imaginary or actual” or even expanded could be see to be “any representation of items in the world as seen”. For example one could create a “Portrait of a Lady’ or “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. The more modern definition is the representation of “an individual known to have lived depicted for his or her own sake. Some might add that a portrait should aim to represent body and soul, or physical and mental presence” (2013, pg 48)

 

She goes on to say a good portrait “captures the essence of the sitter by being much more than a likeness. A good portrait is about history, philosophy, milieu” (2013, pg 59) Renaissance portraiture certainly excelled in capturing a sitters social milieu and historical space. One of my favourite portraits from the Renaissance is Holbien’s "The Ambassadors", a perfect example of likeness (possibly because I’ve never seen the real subjects) but even more importantly, their status, their interests and educational specialities and the world at the moment in time in which they inhabited it.

 

“Given that likeness to the model…are central to portraiture, how can the portrait be reconciled with abstraction?” And this is where we continue to question whether facial likeness is indeed essential to the portrait. “Portraiture is poised between resemblance and transfiguration, between objectification and psycho-social concepts such as identity”. Certainly the semantic/linguistic origins of the word portrait are from the Latin verbs  ‘portraho’ and ‘retraho’ meaning to copy.  I ask does the subject of the copy necessarily have to be the face or can it be another equally important feature of a complex subject. Likeness, after all, is a fairly immeasurable and transient thing…and we need to actually have seen the subject to be able to draw a conclusion as to whether a portrait is a ‘good’ likeness. Often we have never seen the real person. So equally the question arises, can it be a likeness to a subject’s ‘sense of being’ rather than facial features that the artist creates?

Cynthia Freeland in her book Portraits and Persons, defines a portrait as “a representation or depiction of a living being as a unique individual possessing 1/  A recognisable physical body along with 2/  An inner life. That is, some sort of character and/or psychological or mental states” (2010, pg 5)

 

Cynthia Freeland in her book Portraits and Persons, lists the functions of a portrait, one or more of which she believes, are essential for a portrait

To provide a

  1. Likeness

  2. Psychological characterisations

  3. Proofs of presence or to give the viewer a sense of ‘contact’

  4. Manifestations of a person’s ‘essence’ or ‘air’

 

Portraiture is culturally defined. Prior to the renaissance, portraits were for various functions but most significantly to portray the outer likeness of an individual; they did not aim nor attempt to convey any internal nature or deep personality. Their function was to create a sense of either religious veneration in the case of icons and religious portraits (after all, how could the artist know of any inner nature of a religious figure) or of status and power in the case of portraits of royalty and others of high rank and importance to whom the portrait artist almost exclusively had as his subjects.

As portraiture developed into the late renaissance, to capture the inner nature of their subject became part of the painter’s goal; there was an increased interest in realism of the depiction as well as an emphasis on capturing some inner psychological state.

As time has progressed, our essential natures as human individuals have not changed. However our definitions of identity have, and so to have portraits in response to this. Jerrold Seigel argues in his book The idea of Self (2005), there are 3  attributes of self in modern thinking that would define what ideally might be captured in a portrait. They are the BODILY or MATERIAL (face and body) the REFLECTIVE (personality, psyche) and the RELATIONAL (the culture, the other, and the space we inhabit)

 

The rendering of face and body, not so hard; the relational and reflective rendering definitely creates more of a challenge.

MORE TO COME... TALK ABOUT: portraits with stories attached. Street portraits – are they portraits – yes, because we are voyeurs – we create our own story about the anonymous subjects. Much like Warhol’s screen tests – they say nothing, yet we create a ‘story’

 

MORE HERE about Narrative or Transactional Psychology… JA Singer, TR Sarbin et al.

 

 

Sum up my view of portraits

 

Certainly one element, if I can encapsulate such a large notion into one word, is that a portrait I create must be 'authentic'.

What do i mean? More about this...

 

 

 

HOW DO THESE DEFINITIONS TRANSLATE TO SOUND PORTRAITS?

Can voice replace body/face?

Can external sounds replace space & history?

Can sounds that are important to a subject reflect their 'air' or capture smething authentic about their self?

Can narrative illustrate psychological characteristics?

 

I believe a recognisable face is merely one element in creating a portrait and for some portraits, not even an essential element.

No, we don’t need to see a recognisable face as long as there is something to take the place of the bodily/material representation – sound of voice perhaps – because then one can imagine the container?

 

Having said that, I do like to have some sense/shadow/ of the container which holds this reflective, relational being. If not a complete face/body, then at least a hint of it’s shape or form.

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