What is a Portrait?
Last weekend I went to a portrait workshop with local artist and art teacher Morag Stokes. We started by looking at a range of portrait drawings by famous artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Matisse and Picasso. It led to some discussion about what is a portrait. Does it need to be of an actual person and also be recognizable? Morag said if it had to be recognizable then famous self-portraits by for example, Giacometti, wouldn’t be considered portraits. I then asked can a portrait be of an imaginary person.
If you look up definitions of portrait online you can find a variety of meanings, but I think Wikipedia’s covers it well:
Portrait Definition (Wikipedia)
“A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.”
I like drawing faces, and sometimes these evolve into quite detailed ‘portraits’, like the one I call Friar below. Below left is my imagined portrait of a Poor Medieval Woman. I have many more, some of them very strange, others a conglomeration of various people I’ve met.
In Morag’s workshop we copied the styles and media of several artists - the bottom centre is Egon Schiele’s self-portrait in ink (to me it captures the truculence of teenage boys!) - before doing our own self-portraits in that style. I did a range of these. The last image is my self-portrait in charcoal, capturing what seems to be my underlying emotion of sadness.
Portrait of a poor medieval woman (digital, 2022)
After Egon Schiele self-portrait
Self-portrait in charcoal (2024)
