Commissions and Portraiture

As portraiture is one of my main fields of interest, I think it is quite beneficial for me that people commission me to do portraits of their families. Quite often they send me lots of photos from which I choose and edit freely, or I arrange for a photo shoot with the subject or subject matter. I obviously prefer to arrange the photo shoots myself, as it leaves me with more research material, but sometimes I find it very interesting receiving other peoples photos, as I feel that they serve as direct 'footprints' of another persons visual journey.
I have noticed that viewers react very differently to a portrait depicting someone they know and perhaps love as opposed to an image of strangers on display through my work in an exhibition. The fact that they visually know the person better, but also perhaps how they emotionally perceive the person seems to guide how they read my work. Does that make sense?
My depiction of a 'stranger' being arresting, ghostlike, intriguingly sinister or 'hinting of a hidden inner darkness', could all of a sudden be turned to - you've made him look angry, or - there's something not quite right with her eyes - if the portrait is describing a relative or loved one.

As an artist I am obviously interested in more than just making a pretty picture or nice likeness, so I find it challenging to turn the making of a portraiture an interesting journey as well as a vessel of a persons visual features.
I have obviously experienced to receive photos of people I have never met, and even if I get hundreds depicting the same person, I will never be able to add much personal interpretation of anything but the visual features. I will however, add some interpretation , and that input might be what makes a piece of handcrafted art so unique; every mark, every line, and every choice the artist makes has its own story, sometimes independent, or even unrelated of the subject matter entirely. I find that during the quite complicated - often time consuming process of painting or drawing something even as complicated as a face, my mind wanders to other things, and the marks I make can take on their own lives, but still somehow manage to add to the illusion of a unified whole.

When I started out drawing figurative portraits in a more photo-realistic style, I found it very hard to focus on anything but the performance and that is still largely the case, but there somehow seem to be parallel trains of thoughts emerging. When I am drawing the facial features of someone I know, I can't seem to completely free myself of thinking of them and the memories I have associated with that face - almost like my thoughts are kept momentarily prisoners by the image and the cue to my memories it represents. Maybe it signifies some form of meditative activity.

I think the subject of the artist's unconscious investments in his/her work is quite interesting. In one way the artist automatically traps a significant part of time, or even personal history or documentation in the makings of the work. I feel, in my own work, that the rawest, most exposed forms of this 'thought-application' emerges in the pattern-making and stylization. When I paint, I am forced to reinvent shapes and patterns at least two or three times because of sheer technical challenges. As each shape doesn't represent anything but a part of the bigger whole, I am somewhat free to explore and develop them, but as the process can be quite industrial those developments are not always conscious.



I believe the patterns in Fimbul Winter (2005) is a good example of such a journey (below - click on it for a bigger picture). It started out as a stylization of an Italian orange tree and a cityscape, but during the process it became somewhat removed from it entirely. I see strange creatures and small stories when I look at it now, while others might get different associations.