On Portraiture

Daniel Grant has a good article on the Huffington Post about portraiture painting and the artistic and technical skills required.  The overall process of portraiture painting and sculpture should be of interest to professional personal property appraisers. As we occasionally have to value family portraits and determine replacement options for loss situations, understanding the process is an important first step.

Grant writes 

Portraiture calls on a variety of artistic and technical talents, such as a strong understanding of anatomy, solid representational skills and insight into a subject's character that can be expressed in the face and pose. Just as important, however, is the ability to develop a rapport with the subject, if alive, or the people commissioning the portrait, if not. "People aren't used to seeing someone in the medium of clay, and it can be off-putting," Hayes said. "They have the image of the person in their minds, and it takes them a while to get used to a sculpted version."

It also takes people a while to get used to the way in which someone else sees them. The size of their noses and ears often comes as a surprise. "Men ask me, 'Did I really lose that much hair?'" Marc Mellon, a Redding, Conn. sculptor, said. He, like most portrait artists, permits his sitters or whoever is sponsoring the commission to look at his work when it is three-quarters finished, in order to make corrections or other changes. "I tell them, 'I can put some hair back -- it's your call -- but people might not recognize you with all that hair.'" Portraiture isn't a collaborative art, but a great deal depends on the artist's ability to read from a sitter's expression and questions and comments how he or she wants to be portrayed.

The ability to make conversation is a job requirement for portrait artists, who talk to whomever is hiring them about what they want, talk to the living subject while he or she is being measured and photographed in order to gain a sense of who that person is, talk to people who knew the subject (if the portrait is posthumous) so as to understand how that individual appeared to others and talk to whomever needs to approve the model prior to casting about any and all changes that are to be made. Gallery artists may be quite glib, but it is the gallery owner who does the most talking, directed at people who already have some understanding of artistic license. Portrait artists rarely have intermediaries, and they need to be able to describe what they are doing to people with little connection to the arts.

Source: The Huffington Post