The Power of Portraits: The art of the face is making a comeback
-
Surprising as it may seem, this is a pencil drawing by German artist Dirk Dzimirsky, who did this self-portrait after having his girlfriend photograph him under the shower. -
"On the Road to Kathmandu," a watercolor portrait by Dayton, Ohio, artist Homer Hacker, was accepted in the 1975 American Watercolor International show. -
This excerpt from a booklet on "Drawing the Head" by Dayton, Ohio, artist Homer Hacker shows how eyes capture different emotions -
Jacksonville, Fla., artist Jason John's oil portrait, "Pink Lining," shows his trademark use of realism combined with the fantasy of homemade helmets. -
Brandon Fortune, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, said that in Elaine de Kooning's 1963 oil on canvas of President John F. Kennedy, "you recognize him immediately, and you get a sense of his posture, his back pain, the sadness in his face." -
In this portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt, Marius de Zayas described the juxtaposition of black and white triangles and rectangles as quickly capturing his mustache and toothy grin.
Share with others:
At first, it looks like a photograph.
The man's face is beaded with water. As he shuts his eyes against the deluge, the water bounces off his cheek, runs in rivulets down his nose, pools on his lower lip.
But a closer look shows that his shoulders and neck are strangely blurred -- just one small sign that we are actually looking at an incredibly detailed self-portrait by German pencil-and-charcoal artist Dirk Dzimirsky.
Mr. Dzimirsky's realistic, evocative portraits have been gaining visibility since he began the series three years ago, and are part of a general resurgence in portraiture around the globe.
"Portraiture is definitely back throughout the art world," said Brandon Fortune, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
"Because of that," she said, "there are now so many examples of portrait art available to see. The art world is cyclical, and for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, portraiture was the last thing critics thought artists should be doing, but the human face is always appealing and contemporary artists are finding fresh ways of ordering our world, and that includes portraiture."
The fascination with the face in art goes back at least 26,000 years before the birth of Jesus, when some unknown sculptor carved a woman's delicate face in a piece of ivory, found at Dolni Vestonice in what is now the Czech Republic.
The face is slightly crooked, and a few years after it was found, archaeologists located a grave nearby containing the bones of a woman whose skull might have produced the same asymmetrical features.
From that time forward, portraits have always occupied a major part of the artistic firmament, just as we spend much of our visual lives directing our gaze at others' faces.
First Published November 28, 2010 12:00 am
