Commentary On Portraits

[TRANSCRIBED AUDIO: Commentary on Portraits]

“I think the reason I’m obsessed with portraits and people is because I’ve always felt like a person’s personality and the essence of who they are is poorly represented by an image of their face. I mean, yes that is what they look like but who they are is a completely different thing. People may choose to change their appearance to better reflect on the outside what they are on the inside, but the physical form never really matches completely what we want. We’re given it and that’s what we have to work with. The only way, or at least the only way I see it, is that for the physical appearance to match the personality, a person must be able to fully craft their own vessel. Only then would it really be like looking at their personality.

This idea of a person’s essence is what I played with last year in my second project where I took the faces of three individuals that I found interesting and culturally relevant, and juxtaposed them with their experiences and actions in an attempt to inform myself and others of who they are. I found this to be more exhilarating than painting a face, something I can do well but also something that I feel is the ‘white bread’ of artistic expression. It goes nowhere and informs little beyond the visual. This is why the only way to really represent what I want is through digital art.

Technology will give us amazing experiences and tools and one of them is the ability to create art that transcends physical form but also transcends the body and appearance itself. I wrote a manifesto last year about digital art and holograms which I very much still believe in and hope to create work that continues those ideas this term.

I want this project to focus on the representation of a person in a radical new way that ignores faces entirely even as a minor element and instead substitute in something more abstract and odder, human still but part something else, removing anatomy and gifting personality.”