Beatrice
When we moved to Texas in the winter of 2017, in many ways I felt that my art career was over. We had been living in Cincinnati and I was pursuing the academic art thing, painting, teaching, and showing work. We moved to Texas for my wife’s job and learned shortly after that she was pregnant. Like any sane person, I freaked out- decided to chuck the art career and pursue something sensible like insurance. Our landlord told us he could get me a job making a bunch of money starting next week and I decided that it was time to put away the brushes and grow up. The job happened as promised, but the money didn’t and there came this point where I began to sense that God was reaching out to me and asking me to start making art again. This came directly in the words of my wife when she asked, “would you rather keep working this insurance job, or would you want to stay home with the baby and paint?” The only work I could get at the time was of dog portraits, but they paid roughly the same as the insurance job. I called an old art teacher who I had apprenticed with and I told him, full of shame that I had been painting dog portraits after I had been a “serious artist” for the past however many years- during my MFA days and etc. He said, “you should never be ashamed to support your family with your talents and that doing dog portraits was honorable.” So I decided to believe him and I thought, I can do this.
In those first few weeks and months after Beatrice was born, I would nap her in our backyard studio and do drawings of her. This was one of the pieces and the re-awakening to the value of the portrait.
Margot
At the time, I met with our priest Father Lee Nelson, who’s portrait we will look at later, and he encouraged me to pursue portraiture more fully as a business and to create art and so I began pursuing opportunities to do that. Around this time, I met the Fish family and asked if I could paint a portrait of Margot, their eldest daughter. It was during this portrait, that my process of portraiture began to emerge- this was mainly due to needs of practicality. Before this point I was staunchly against the use of photographic images in the production of my work and worked solely from the live model, but life with a young baby and other contributing factors made this untenable, and thus a process was born.
It started with a question. Margot, is there something that you like doing that is very natural for you and could be the basis of your portrait? She responded that she needed to practice her cello and maybe that would be a good idea? It was. I came over to the Fish home, was served tea and then drew Margot as she practiced her cello lessons. Over the course of an hour or so, many drawings were worked up in pencil and charcoal, but it was obvious that the drawings would not suffice for reference material- and I began to take photos of her too. Through this process- it was apparent that Margot was self-conscious of being drawn for a portrait and she was performing, but after about an hour- she began to forget I was there and she had moments of self-forgetfulness and absorption in her cello practice. That first moment of it, was captured here in the charcoal drawing of Margot.
What I didn’t realize then, but looking back it makes sense, that this moment began the search for that illusive quality of the un-self-conscious, embodied, natural person.
Getting back to the studio and combing through the sketches and the photos, I was able to sense this moment again through the images and worked to develop a sense of this moment in the finished portrait, displayed here.
Portrait of Dr. Aly Barnes
Fast forward now to a couple years later in 2019/2020 and I’m teaching drawing and painting again, now at Live Oak Classical School, and am back into my art practice and have an exhibition coming up and begin thinking through a series of portraits that I would like to do to include in this exhibition.
The original idea was to draw and paint people who seemed to be living out their God given calling, or what I had come to title (for the exhibition) living out “Divine Irresponsibility.” The idea referred to a talk delivered by Fr. Washington Jarvis, former headmaster of Roxbury Latin to his students. In it he describes a person who is living out of a divine irresponsibility--referencing Satre’s “divine irresponsibility of the condemned man” as being a liberating force that has the potential to shift our perspectives and consequently how we live-- or as I would describe it, that they ceased to operate out of a materialistic mode of living and would be living seemingly irresponsibly according to the dictates of a materialistic worldview. Instead, they were living from a place of faith, where they had discerned something of their calling and we’re operating out of that. I wrote down a list of people that I knew and started working my way through it, Aly was the first person on my list.
During the portrait sessions working with Aly in my studio, she started to teach me things, which is something she did without realizing it, and that is the moment that I tried to capture of her. It was during this session of drawing her portrait that I became aware of the idea that what I was searching for in this quest was what Thomas Aquinas calls intellectus, according to Aquinas, the intellectus is
“…not here taken to mean the intellective power itself, but a particular habit by which man naturally knows indemonstrable principles in the light provided by the agent intellect… principles of this kind are known immediately once their terms are understood. As soon as one knows what a whole is and what a part is, he immediately recognizes that the whole is greater than the part. It is said to be intellectus from the fact that it reads within (intus legit) by grasping the essence of the thing.”
How I began to understand this in the portrait was a moment in time where the person was expressing a form of embodied knowledge, where they were bringing to bear in a temporal and prescient way their genius- or for the sake of the initial idea- their lived/corporeal divine irresponsibility.
Getting to this point with a person, or with Aly or any of the sitters takes some time and I have found that it comes through a long session of prolonged and sustained effort- within the context of a prolonged craft. Meaning, that I could not get to this point without having been making paintings and drawings for a long period of sustained effort, nor could I get there in this particular instance without a long period of time with the person in the portrait session.
Aly came to the studio with a set of books and papers that she was thinking about and writing about and when the portrait session started, she began by sitting in a chair and reading. Then she changed poses and started to write- I drew and took photos from all angles. Eventually she started to teach me. It wasn’t formal, we were just talking, but she began to ask me questions and illustrating ideas, and while she was doing that I noticed something, she had ceased ratio(as Aquinas would describe as…) and became very natural and integrated within herself, as if it were as effortless as breathing. It was that moment that I knew I was looking for. I started drawing and taking photos again but knew that I found it. The moment that I ultimately chose to portray was this moment, where she is looking off somewhere in her mind, yet present, but contemplative- you can see it in the aloofness from the eyes-she has just rested her head upon her hand that was, seconds ago animated and waving through the air illustrating her point- and there is this moment of a quiet satisfaction, joy, and contentment.
Other Portraits (Watercolors)
At some point during 2020, I became aware of the importance of portrait painting and drawing in a new way that I had not felt before. Ultimately, I began to think how precious people are and started to reflect on the how individual persons displayed the Imago Dei. Specifically, I began thinking about how the people who sat for me displayed the imago Dei and really, it was quite simple, but also profound. I once read this article about people who go to museums and cry in front of paintings- it’s happened to me a few times, the first time was when I saw the Tiepolo’s at the MET, I was awestruck by their beauty, but this was something of a different character. The story I heard was of a woman who went to look at a portrait, maybe it was a Holbein- repeatedly over the course of several years. She did not know this person in the portrait, and it wasn’t someone particularly important in the world’s eyes, but eventually this person would cry when looking at the portrait. They must have developed such a deep sense of empathy for this person through their painted image and the person became so prescient to them and spending time with the portrait was like spending time with the person and it affected them in some way to make them cry. I thought maybe the experience of spending time with the person while drawing them, both while they sat and then also while in the studio would reveal something about that person in a similar way and consequently how they imaged God.
Father Lee Nelson
A few things were revealed to me through this process, and it was brought to bear most fully upon reflection of the portrait of Father Lee Nelson. We went through the now usual routine of a portrait session. We met at the church, first he in vestment’s up at the podium, then in his office talking about John Henry Newman and G.K. Chesterton, then in front of the stained glass with the baptismal font. They were examples of some of his many offices as priest; as preacher, teacher, counselor, and baptizer. Eventually we ended up at the coffee shop, where he is known to frequent, and we had a casual conversation- this was another way I knew him to be himself. But it wasn’t until after the portrait was finished that I realized one of the important truths of portrait painting and the imago Dei. What I learned was that sometimes we see things about people that they cannot see themselves. And this showed me that the imago Dei was not just about the person being represented, but also about the representer.
When I picked up the portrait from Fr. Lee, he said something profound that illustrated this beautifully. He said, “thanks for taking it off my hands for a little while. It haunts me. I love it and I hate it, that’s how I know that you nailed it.” This reminded me of one of the difficulties of painting portraits- that is- that while painting a portrait, you are seeing a person, potentially in a fuller way, or at least in a different way than they see themselves. When we see ourselves the way that painting a portrait can (if the artist is true to their perception and not influenced by the expectation of the sitter to image them to themselves the way that they want to see themselves) then we see them as they are. When they see it, there is some friction, because something is shown that is hidden from the self-perception of the sitter and can be jarring. But the thing that the artist can do- is that when they see this person- they can love the person as they see them. I think this love of the person that is revealed through the seeing- and then imaged in the portrait, is part of what the Imago Dei in portraiture is. This reminds me of how God sees us. He sees us as these full persons, that we cannot see ourselves. We see this part of ourselves that we love and this part that we hide from ourselves and others, because we hate it. But when we are imaged by an artist, imperfectly of course, it is a small fraction of how God sees us and a reminder of how he loves us. And I think it can provide existential healing to trust that if others see us in a fuller way than we see and or love ourselves, that God sees us that way and more, and is imaged in us and loves us. But he chooses to be imaged in us.
We also learn to love the sitter as we see them. The image of God extends beyond the person that is being depicted and is expressed in the artist’s production of the portrait. There is then a triune nature to the creation of a portrait that involves the sitter, the artist, and God.
From this, Questions that arose that I couldn’t and can’t quite answer. 1.) How could it be that creation of the portrait of a person could be filtered through the imperfection of the artist’s perception and translated through the imperfection of the artist’s hand, further the imperfection of the materiality of the tools (i.e., brushes and pencils, and paper, or canvas), and still image God? Further, could the artist abstract the image, or distort it intentionally and still honor the image of God in the person? Would anything but a perfect portrait- if there is such a thing- image God? If it is abstraction, does the artist do violence to the image of the person, or the image of God in the person?
Ultimately, I concluded that the artist cannot help but be limited by time, training, talent, tradition, imperfect perception, means of production, imperfect discernment in the process or creation, etc. There must be a way in which God images forth corporeally and temporally in the specific person’s that can allow for the imperfections and that He can be glorified and even imaged in these imperfect attempts. I like to take Picasso for example, as someone who would paint and abstract and even deconstruct the images of others, and he was no saint, and could he still be- without his knowing- be participating in the image of God as he created a portrait? That’s a question that I can’t quite answer, but I suspect- without being so bold as to be heretical- that the answer lies in the incarnation and with Jesus taking the nature of man into his divine nature and being united in the person of Christ. This ultimately to me is the justification for the inherent dignity and meaning of the person as showing forth the imago Dei, and also the justification for the artist to image forth another in portraiture and it creates the conditions for the reception-- by the artist- of God’s grace for his imperfection in depiction or even, possibly his abstraction through the will, and then finally it provides the justification for the creation of portraits.