All websites mentioned in this post were accessed between 2 and 5 December 2015.
02 December, 2015. I just realised that I will have to portray someone dependent on his professional power and social status to nurture his self-confidence. He knows that the incident with the car has immense destructive quality in that respect and therefore has to be kept secret. Being a doctor means to betray both the ethos as a human being and as a professional to keep up the now false image. Both are rightly condemned by society, therefore the fear of being found out. The portrait needs to convey these conflicting interests in the matter of an instant, i.e. between realising the accident has happened and the decision to drive on without helping. Therefore, a charcoal portrait may not be sufficient to qualify as transporter of status. Since I experimented with acrylic mixed media earlier this year, I might refer to the experience gained making the drawing of the skeleton of a radiolarian skeleton. The acrylic background should however not take up the whole of the paper or cardboard, so that the charcoal accident can happen, dissolve and creep up the acrylic face. I need to take care that the colours depicting facial features to be changed provide a smooth surface. Once I have completed the preliminary experiments I will decide on the best way to deal with this subject.
05 December, 2015. The first step in the process, however, is some research into works of art transporting the emotions of fear and cruelty as well as portraits allowing direct contact with the viewer. Instantly I found a connected series of portraits by Theodora Sutton (http://cargocollective.com/theodorasutton/rotoscope-animation-1). While the style and colour change slightly with each portrait and the viewpoint rotates around her face, the person never takes her eyes off the viewer apart from a short moment when she is depicted with her eyes closed. As mentioned in my Assignment 4 reflections, my tutor also pointed me to the work of Dryden Goodwin, who attempts to capture the intensity of his encounters in his portrait drawings (Jack Southern in interview with Deryden Goodwin in the book Drawing Projects). A video interview on http://www.drydengoodwin.com/videolinks.htm emphasizes again his intention not to merely catch a physical likeness, but to weave into the drawing “something that cannot be seen”, a quality, which is, I think, communicated by intuition only and which acts to make an important difference between a portrait and a portrait that moves one to tears (as e.g. in Käthe Kollwitz). Connecting smoothly with my own intentions is Goodwin’s 2010 project “Linear”. Jubilee line staff was portrayed (with line drawings) and the process of drawing with the members of staff talking in the background about their work experiences filmed. Viewing the two media side by side allows not only the process of drawing to become tangible within the finished piece. The stories told are very likely to have influenced Goodwin’s drawing. My own approach does nothing else apart from the important fact that the story told is in part fictional and the reaction of the portrayed person imaginary. In that way my project is only partly documentary and more heavily influenced by my own a priori interpretation of what is going to be.
Since the main emotion to be transported in my portrait is fear, I also had a look at a number of artists working in that field. Philip Hicks’ fearful portrait “Victims I” (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hicks-victims-i-p01417) is brilliant and a wonderful source to study the facial features associated with that particular emotion, but I do not understand why he would have wanted to surround it with symbols, taking away some of its intensity. Marlene Dumas’ haunting 2004 portrait “Lucy” (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dumas-lucy-t12313) on the other hand does, of course, not capture an emotion on the face of the girl, but its all-too-easy-to-interpret posture evokes the same feeling, instantly, in the viewer. This made me realise that in my project the accident, leaving a dying child behind, may greatly increase the emotional load of the whole drawing – and importantly not with contradictory but the same types of emotion. I was also glad to find John Keane’s “Fear” series, which won the 2015 Aesthetica Art Prize (http://www.yorkstmarys.org.uk/news-media/latest-news/winners-announced-for-the-aesthetica-art-prize-awards-2015/). It shows oil paintings made on the basis of Moscow trial mug shots and instantly connects with my research and drawings of George Stinney. The paintings work not only through a believable depiction of an emotion, but of course by their sheer size and, importantly, through a very cleverly used communication of light and dark with the actual faces. The most haunting of these were, in my opinion http://www.flowersgallery.com/works/view/13631-fear-no-191037 and http://www.flowersgallery.com/works/view/14672-fear-no-48818665, both of which appear to effuse cruelty and trigger a feeling of fear in the viewer. I will keep this technique in mind when planning the layout of my own drawing.
Thinking about my own project things suddenly become more complex, because the accident raises fear, for different reasons, both in the viewer and the doctor, but when the experience acts to change the doctor’s face to radiate cruelty, looking at the face should increase the feeling of fear in the viewer.
Given that I succeed in depicting the emotions correctly. Which means that the next step in the process will be to take out my sketchbook and investigate the facial features characteristic of fear and cruelty.
Andrea's OCA study blog 