THE EXHILIRATION OF PORTRAITURE

by Lelaina Scott

Portraiture exhilarates me every time I sit down to start a new piece. It’s my primary subject for my art. Maybe it’s that our brains are wired to recognize nuances in the facial expressions of people, maybe it’s because they’re so easy to get wrong or maybe it’s because every portrait I create is also a self-portrait.

When creating a face on a 2D surface, whether the subject is a stranger, a close member of my family or a celebrity, your brain is screaming the entire time. That’s wrong. Something’s off. It doesn’t look right. Our brains, specifically the fusiform gyrus if you want to get fancy, are designed to recognize faces. When you go to an art gallery and you see a painting of a person – even an abstract one – your brain finds the face. While this can make the process itself a bit nerve-wracking, it provides a built-in tool. Even people who aren’t artists themselves can recognize a face. Our brains can pick out eyes, noses and mouths. As soon as I put brush to canvas, pencil to paper, I start working overtime in facial recognition. What’s off? What’s working? I love the challenge and I love how to feels to interact with people in this way.

People are important to us. We like looking at faces and depicting them, ever since we had earth pigment and cave walls at our fingertips; people have been depicting people.

While there is a primal element to incorporating people and faces into artworks, I find so much beauty in the process. About a year ago now I taught a portraiture class to adults who just wanted to learn for their own enjoyment. Everyone looked terrified to begin. What if it looks wrong? Scary? Ugly? What if? There’s always, in my experience, a fear of messing up when creating any kind of art, but for portraiture it feels personal. It feels offensive. There’s a pressure to do the subject justice, to capture a certain angle, a certain radiance. To capture their uneven eye shape, the mole under their left eyebrow, their crooked bottom teeth (if you are so daring enough as to decide to paint teeth) in the first place. I thought for a minute and, as I helped everyone choose a reference and get ready to begin, I gave some words of advice. Words I wish I had someone tell me when I was first starting:

It’s going to look bad. Real bad. Funny, even. The proportions will be all out of whack, the lines will be harsh and odd and you will feel REALLY bad about yourself and your artistic abilities. It’s okay. It’s a normal part of the process to have your brain screaming that it’s wrong. Laugh! It’ll look silly.

Your reference is a tool, not the law. While photorealism is a stunning and skillful style of art, more often you’re going to be using a reference as a guide for your final piece.

Trust the process. This is true of any artform but is especially true for portraiture. It’s going to look weird for a long time. A lot of times, I think my pieces look weird until the very final touches.

I have these saved for myself as reminders, and I read them over again more often than you think. It was exactly what my students, and myself, needed to hear. They made some of the most expressive and impressive pieces, if I do say so myself.

Using the human face in your art requires a lot of trust. Trust in the process, trust in your vision, trust in yourself and your skills and trust that you’ll always learn something from human subjects. Capturing the last eyelash, adding the final shine atop their cheek, watching your piece and your message come to life? It’s personal.

Every portrait is a self-portrait, not because you’re a human creating a human, but because portraiture requires you to put so much in yourself in the creation and the vision that, after you add the final glint in the eye, you can’t help but see yourself.

I encourage you to try portraiture. Watch people, look at models in magazines, your friend’s Instagram posts, a stranger making a dramatic facial expression and pause. Take it in. Fall in love with humans. Whether you’re a beginner artist or a long-time professional or just have a functioning fusiform gyrus, it’s time to fall in love with people again through art.

Lelaina Scott is a Pittsburgh-based artist. She has a degree in Visual Arts and Music Studies from Pennsylvania State University and her work has been displayed at 3 Dots and the Bellefonte Museum of Art. She has had her work published in several local publications including State College Magazine, Kalliope Magazine and Valley Magazine.

Want to see a different take on portraiture and the human form? This month’s articles are published with support from The Frick Pittsburgh for Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). As Zach Hunley wrote in Petrichor: “When viewing the work of Kara Walker, you are bearing witness to history and time compounded.” Revisit the past and rethink the present now at the Frick Art Museum.