The various ways we think about time are central to an appreciation of portraiture. Several different temporal measures overlap and are read simultaneously. The first is a recognition of time as a factor in human lives. We are very used to looking at other people and are able to judge their age and social status at a glance. We might not be able to judge a cat's age so quickly, but we are very adept at checking out other human beings. So the first measure is probably from 0 to 100, broken down by us into baby, child, youngster, teenager, young man/woman, mature, old, ancient etc. Our particular empathy being probably with those that we judge to be of similar age to ourselves.
Picasso: Claude writing
The next measure is one that is dependent on the way a medium works and how it has been used. If the medium is one that operates in such a way that it leaves traces of its contact with a surface, we can analyse the traces and look for how many points of contact have been recorded on the surface we are examining. Looked at carefully a drawing or painting can reveal a story of its own making and as we follow this story we get a sense of how long the maker was engaged in the work's making. A typical example would be the drawings of Frank Auerbach, and I'm sure that one of the reasons these drawings are appreciated so much is that we can see the story of their making.
Auerback
Ginny Grayson is an artist that records the times of her work in progress. In her case it is all about the different times she made her observations. You can see the framed series of photographs taken as the work progressed in the image below.
Ginny Grayson
Luboš Plný is another artist that dates his drawings as they progress, but in his case he is documenting the gradual growth of an idea that comes from imaginative interpretation, rather than observation. See the dates written down the bottom right of the image below.
Luboš Plný
A historical time of making is read in relation to our own time period on earth, and the further away from us historically an image was made, the more this resonates.
Hans Holbein 1527
Roman period Egypt portrait from approximately 100 BC
26,000 year old portrait carved in ivory: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute.
There is also the time associated with the materials of the making. The Roman period Egyptian portrait of a woman above was made in wax encaustic on a wooden panel. Beeswax is a wonderful preservative and keeps colours fresh and alive over long periods of time. An ivory carving will last for thousands of years without deterioration if buried in the dust of a cave floor. The images above can startle us by their apparent freshness or make us thoughtful as we contemplate the time distance from our contemporary society.
A faded photograph
The materials that go to make a photograph are all notoriously ephemeral. Paper tends to be very vulnerable to both chemical and physical deterioration and many photographic processes are liable to fade when exposed to light. This can mean that although photography is a relatively modern technology, it can still be used to represent time passing.
The recent advent of the video portrait has added a further dimension to how we read time in relation to portraiture, moving images question many of our previous assumptions.
Andy Warhol: Film portrait of Edie Sedgwick
The video portraits trace their format back to the film portraits of Andy Warhol. An awareness of the historical time of making is still important to their reading as well as of the materials of their making, (all of Warhol's film portraits have been transferred to video because of the deterioration of old film stock) but added into the way they are understood is the durational aspect of the work. All drawings and paintings are static and seen by the viewer as a simultaneity. As an observer you need to put in considerable effort over a period of time to engage with an understanding of what you have in front of you. Stillness is very unlike life, therefore instead of automatically responding to an event, as you do when something happens, (i.e. moves), you have to intellectually engage and think about what the image might mean. Film and video seem to play out a period of real life, even if they do it over and over again, in effect the person appears as if they 'live again' in front of your eyes. The addition of movement suggests life. Conversely, when we stop moving, we are dead. Therefore our engagement with a video portrait is complex. It both operates as a recoding and we are aware of it as something that captures a past period of time, and as a reality, as it can move in 'real' time. Some video portraitists slow down the speed of their videos in order to further play with this ambiguity.
Bo Gehring: Portrait of Esperanza Spalding
James Nare: Video portrait of Jim Jarmusch
Most video portraits still refer to the long tradition of portrait painting and concentrate on the head, James Nare's portrait of Jim Jarmusch being typical, but there are exceptions such as Bo Gehring's portrait of Esperanza Spalding, which tracks over her whole body.
Some artists such as Dryden Goodwin, attempt to build an awareness of moving time into their drawings in a way that suggests they have been influenced by video portraits, especially those that use time-lapse techniques.
Dryden Goodwin: Red studies 2004/6
Time and people come together in Dryden Goodwin's work, he has an ability to both capture how someone looks as well as suggest the fragile nature of life within the liquid modernity of urban spaces.
Dryden Goodwin
Goodwin is happy to mix video with drawing and installation practices, his work celebrating those brief moments of encounter whereby we become momentarily aware of the presence of others. His ability to capture those short encounters in the way he allows his drawing hand to follow his eye tracking movements, is very refined and for those of us that draw, they become readable palimpsests, as his points and marks of looking build over the white paper and then over each other to create a layered but open and readable experience for the trained observer.
Another issue is what happens when the same person has portraits made of them over time. When the artist William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he decided to confront the situation and carry on making portraits of himself. Before his death in 2007, he created a final series of self-portraits that record the stages of Alzheimer’s that he went through. Over a period of roughly five years he documented the gradual decay of his mind.
William Utermohlen
It is interesting to compare what Utermohlen did with Picasso's lifelong interest in his own image. The sophisticated 15 year old eventually becomes the 92 year old on the threshold of death.
Picasso: First and last self portraits
Even in his very last self portrait Picasso was still working through the implications of Cubism. His face pushes and pulls itself as it moves first one way and then another, its as if all his energy was fused into this one last attempt to hold time in motion.
Jackson Pollock: No: 7
Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a dream
Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) attempt to freeze time, so that they can help their audience think about the dignity of old age. This Cuban artist collective is best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing.
Los Carpinteros: Portraits on buildings
They visited old people’s homes, nursing homes and asylums, looking for facial expressions of older people that could lend themselves to an architectural translation. Then they alternated between hand-drawn and digital processes in order to simplify the photographic image. What was an image taken by a camera in a brief moment, is gradually converted into an essence of itself, in a way that slows down the read.
Los Carpinteros: the design process
Finished portrait installed in a gallery
Tony Bevan
It is interesting to compare these pieces with the work of Tony Bevan. His portraits also attempt to reveal a structural framework, but this time in a much more emotionally intense manner, he attempts to also 'freeze' time in order to monumentalise the head.
Finally the busy post-modern time of now, with its streaming images of multifaceted information channels has seen a return to collage as a way to squeeze together competing image strands into the same portrait. Artists such as Nathaniel Mary Quinn demonstrating that there is always something new about time to think about when making a portrait. His images suggesting a type of liquid modernity that was documented by Zygmunt Bauman.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Time in Quinn's case being a flickering one that never quite stands still. It is interesting to compare his approach with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's. Her portraits are always of imaginary figures that coalesce out of her mind as she paints. Her images seem as if they are of reality but are in fact realisations of her dreams and all dreams aspire to a state of being timeless.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Tam Joseph: School report
Tam Joseph's 'School report reflects the reality of young male black lives and how they are shaped over time by society's stereotypes.
Charles Howard Hodges: Master Adolf Johan Bernard Wattendorff
See also:
Self portrait drawings
Drawing and time
Portraits and control
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