Life Size self-portrait 2000 Acrylic on canvas

The show is called Artists Portraits and it’s on the 24th of April 2010 at 17:00 at the Marseille Project Gallery, directions here.

We started out in Part I: the drawings.  And here are the various stages of this portrait.  In total, it was 6 sittings, 5 of which are shown.

State 1

Lira Kay: state 1

I find it disturbing to see portraits that are started and stopped in one session.  The idea of getting it absolutely right so quickly seems to show two things: that there is an ‘absolutely right’ and that it would be so easy to find.  I think the portrait process is a journey, and my journeys involve all sorts of turns and fumbles and questions.

State 1 here is an example of that.  The skin tone has little to do with the hair tone here, which in turn has little to do with the background.  The heaviness of the skin tone sheds light on the importance I place on the face.

State 2

Lira Kay: state 2

This is about making the tones even and trying to find my darling’s face!  The tones now give the impression of a head rather than a face, and the colors of the light and shadows are being worked out.

Besides this, the ‘drawing’ is made concrete, so in future changes I will be able to modify the drawing with established colors for her features. This is an important part of the process of painting.  The continual switch between abstract and concrete to take advantage of each.  In this case, the abstract use of colors for light and shade lead to a concrete decision about which colors to use to establish the drawing.

State 4

Lira Kay: state 4

We skipped one.  When I finished it, I didn’t want it recorded.  In a word it was soupy.  But state 4 is interesting in that it overcompensates.   I was elated with this state, until I let it sink in over the course of a couple of weeks, at which point I realized I had it completely wrong.  It was a great portrait of somebody else. Which leads us to…

State 5

Lira Kay: State 5

Well that’s not her either, but the important thing was that I could destroy state 4, the previous state, which I was attached to but knew was wrong.  Remember that between these attacks there was anything from a few days to a few weeks.  And so the final state was an attempt to take all that I had from the other states and perform the miracle of the portrait.

The final portrait

Lira Kay 2009

And there it is: a portrait of my wife, and one which I will always treasure, even though i can see there are a few flaws here and there (I am writing several months since completion).  On the whole it is my best portrait to date.

Going back to Part I of this essay, what I love about the process of portrait painting is that it is a synthetic process.  The drawings from Part I are all in this final state.  In fact, the painting was a way of capturing all the drawings in one work.  Looking back over Part I, you’ll see which parts of the drawings I like: the character, the composition, the feeling.  These are all incorporated into the final painting, but the painting has an additional something lent to it by the colors.  This atmosphere is difficult to capture without color and it is for this reason paintings exist.

Creating a portrait takes a serious commitment from myself and the sitter.  The portrait of my dad took about 10 sittings for the drawings and another 10 or 15 for the painting.

I am currently working on two portraits, one of my wife and another of my children.  In this post, I’ll show you the drawings of my wife that led up to the portrait. In a later post, I’ll take you through the painting stages…

So, here’s the first drawing.

Drawing Number 1

The first drawing is where I start with knowing.  I know what I want and I just draw it exactly as I want.  In this case, I want a big head and I want to reflect the loving and youthful character of my wife.

Why the big head? I think there is a certain ratio I like to have between the size of the head and the canvas. Also, big heads signify affection, as any child psychologist will tell you.

Here is the second drawing. 

Drawing number 2

The second drawing is more of an exploration, an attempt to define the structure of the face, an opportunity to let go of prejudices. The result is something which eliminates character and so becomes less of a caricature.

Drawing number 3

The third drawing tries to bring back the character that was lost in from the first drawing.  At the same time it tries to forge a more precise rendering of the character.  In particular, what is better about this drawing than the first is the shape of the head which portrays the character in a more meaningful way. What’s worse about this drawing as that we’ve lost the eyes.  I don’t really know how that happened…

Drawing number 4

Drawing number 4 accentuates the eyes and posture and is more of a composition.

Drawing number 5

And the final drawing in the series shows a kind of disintegration of the process. 

What’s interesting to see is that each work really tries to correct the previous works.  We can see that the critical faculties are balanced by the positive forces so that each work alternately forgets and remembers what was bad and what was good about the previous works.

The reason to move on to paintings is to have a way that all the versions can be overlaid to produce something which is more comprehensive, though less spontaneous, than the drawings.