Portrait without likeness
Lucian Freud
Although Freud was very eager to leave behind the, as Brian Balfour-Oatts puts it, draughtsman-like style of his early paintings, I am fascinated by them. His early paintings seem more tense, cold, and disturbing than his mature period. This group of paintings, which combine figures with plants, animals, or objects, is an attempt to project the portrait subject onto the external world.
It is difficult to describe the figures as more alive than the flora, which seems to be a body extending from the inside of the figure - closed off to the outer world. The rigid lines seem to inject a feather, a leaf, with a unique energy, an undisguised wariness, an alternative intimacy.
“Lucian Freud's Long-Overlooked Early Works Are Poised for Resurgence.” Art Lover News, December 11, 2020. https://news.afyc.com/lucian-freuds-long-overlooked-early-works-are-poised-for-resurgence/.
ALISON WATT extracts the elements of the objects and attributes from her admired painter Alan Ramsey's many portraits of women - the objects they hold, their clothes, their surroundings - to create paintings that are emotionally charged, oscillating between still life and portraiture paintings, and which contain hints of narrative.
"A still life can be very intimate ...... By its very nature, it is linked to a portrait. A still life is a portrait without a portrait."
Margaret Lindsay of Evelick
by Allan Ramsay
Oil on canvas, painted about 1758-60
Lindsay
by Alison Watt
Oil on canvas
"... In the paintings I've made, I have wondered why I've chosen to look at certain things over others, and what has caused me to make those choices. It's fascinating to me how we respond to certain objects. How we, often unconsciously, tap into both memory and feeling. So, our perception of an object is quite particular. We select, we edit, and in editing we are creating our own juxtapositions. I like to portray the same objects multiple times, from different perspectives, as a way of suggesting that how we view the still life fluctuates. Sometimes objects stand for what they are, sometimes they suggest something other. One of the aspects that I love about the still life as a genre is that it can both offer you familiarity with an object, but also transcend the everyday. You have said that there has always been an element of self-portraiture in your paintings."
Wemyss
Bayne
Walpole
Domenico Gnoli
In Domenico Gnoli's paintings, the figures' presence is magnified on a large-scale canvas beyond recognition, so that one can only focus on their foreheads or the edges of their clothes. Meticulously waxed hair, jacquard dresses pinned with pearl buttons, ironed and smoothed suit pockets packed with a hanky, stylishly polished high heels ... ‘In their neat vision of an ordered and beautiful world, these paintings align the pleasures of Gnoli’s craftsmanly bravado with the comforts of the sumptuously groomed world they depict, and that he lived in’（Davis, B. 2018, June 1）. Reality becomes surreal as the details are enlarged to a size almost equal to human size.
