Portraits Again

 

I wrote on the topic of portraits previously, but today I felt the need to do it again.  The reason was a story on the CBS Sunday Morning show about Jenny Saville.  She's a fairly famous artist (I've heard of her) who seems to specialize in very large scale head and figure pieces of a somewhat expressionist nature.  Realistic, but not.  (there are plenty of examples of her work on the web if you want to go looking for it)  I like it well enough, but it's not something I would do.  Yet when she named her inspirations, a lot of them were the same artists who I have looked at and inspired me.  Also, I showed five pieces in my Studio at last week's Open Studio event.  Two of them were pieces with small figures, my large America piece and the latest completed boardwalk print (some from models, some from photographs, and some right out of my head), and three were life sized head and figure pieces, in black and white.  One was the image at the top of this post.  One was the image shown on the previous post about portraits, and one was an image of my friend Kathy, much better than the previous one I had tried to do of her.  By this selection, it is obvious that I like portrait pieces. 

As I said last time, I don't necessarily consider all head and figure pieces to be portraits.  The piece at the top of this post for instance I don't consider a portrait, because it is not about the person who posed for it.  I think it looks a bit like her, as was intended. (see the photo below for the posed model)

But the piece is not about her.  It's about the concept of a person with a job of some kind taking a smoke break outside, a common sight in that time period.  The model was just someone I knew and hired to pose for the piece.  I knew she was a capable model, and had enough experience of smoking to pull it off.  (the original person who inspired it declined to pose for it)  On the other hand, the other two pieces I showed last week were very much about the people who posed for them, and I do consider these to be portraits.  In both cases the original blocks were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, so these framed copies are the only ones I have, and not for sale.

So how do Jenny Saville and I have a lot of the same inspirations and very different types of work?  I think what it comes down to is what you take from the previous artist, and what your goals are.  One thing I said often the other day was that the process of woodcut hasn't changed much in the last 500 years, so it really comes down to the drawing.  And this is true.  There is a big difference between my work, and the work of contemporary woodcut artist Tom Huck, and renaissance artist Albrect Durer, yet we all use the same process to produce our work- draw something, remove that which we wish to be white, leave behind what we wish to be black, and then ink it and print it.  In Durer's case it was likely others who did the actual cutting and printing, but the process is the same one.  Saville looked at Lucien Freud and seems to have taken a little of his painting style, his interest in sometimes telling stories, his use of head and figure, and his willingness to sometimes work with models who are not necessarily what is considered attractive by society, but interesting to art.  I look at Lucien Freud and took from him his approach to realism, an interest in telling stories, and his use of head and figure.  It all seems to have worked out.