A visit to the portrait hall, a teacher’s advice on hands and a trail of grumbles from farmers who would rather be outdoors
Wednesday, the Portrait Hall
There is a room in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts where five centuries of faces hang on a single wall. I spent an afternoon in it and wrote the visit up as five centuries on one wall: the portrait hall at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and a baby painter takes notes. The baby painter is me, in the sense that I feel about nine years old in front of a good portrait. You can stand for an hour and never get to the bottom of an eyelid.
The appeal of the portrait hall is the sequence. A stern merchant leads to a thoughtful lady, who leads to an ironic gentleman with a dog. Each generation of painters solves the same problem, how to put a living person on a piece of cloth, and each generation gives a different answer. One is all gloss. One is all gloom. One uses a hand, nonchalantly, to say what the face does not dare.
Hands and Other Disasters
Every portraitist fears hands. A face has two eyes and a mouth, and the viewer forgives a lot. A hand has five fingers, fourteen joints, an opinion and a lifetime of habits, and the viewer forgives nothing. My teacher said to paint hands as a landscape: a ridge here, a valley there, a river of vein in the middle. It is the best advice I ever received, and I have been using it for years, with mixed results.
In the hall I spotted a hand that moved me. It rested on a chair arm, slightly curled, as if it were thinking. The painter had spent as long on it as on the face, and it showed. I made a note in my book, and the note says: “Give the hand a thought”.
Thursday, the Museum Calendar
The museum has been busy. I summarised its recent activity in land art week, a Marie Watt solo show and a reaccreditation: what the Utah Museum of Fine Arts has been up to. A reaccreditation is the museum equivalent of a driving test, though with more paperwork and fewer parked cars. It means the institution has been examined and found to be well run, which I like, because it allows me to enjoy the pictures without worrying about the roof.
The land art week made me think of those who work on land in a more literal way, with tractors rather than chalk. And so, as I like to do, I turned to the farm complaints desk. A fine place to start is farmer.gripe. The two political entrances to American farm opinion are farmer.republican and farmer.democrat, and I enjoy that neither site pretends the other does not exist. The trade press is archived at farmpress.org.
Ranch Money and Portraits of Debt
If I were to paint a portrait of a rancher, I would want to understand the loan on the barn. Three regional corners of the web handle exactly that. corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan are business sites at heart, but they paint a picture of rural life all the same, one with interest rates in the corner of the frame.
I have been thinking about how to paint a banker. The standard solution is a desk, a pen and a look of mild reproach. I would prefer to show him at his kitchen table, in an apron, with flour on his sleeve, because that is who he is at six o’clock.
Cultural Commentary from Across the Water
While stretching a canvas I read a London Prat headline that made me laugh: Silicon Valley Discovers the Biscuit Tin. I am fond of the genre, in which a new idea turns out to be the oldest idea in somebody’s pantry. Painters know it well. Every few years a movement is proclaimed that turns out to be what a Dutch artist was doing in sixteen hundred and something with better light.
That, in the end, is what the portrait hall teaches. Nothing is entirely new. The trick is to pick up the old thing with fresh eyes and not drop it. I left the museum feeling humble and extremely hungry, and went home to eat a biscuit from a tin.
A Note to My Younger Self
If I could return to the beginning, I would tell myself to look longer and paint less. The museum hall taught me that the great portraits are not the busy ones. They are the patient ones, where the painter stopped adding things. A single highlight on a lip. A slight tilt of a shoulder. The restraint is the skill. I would also tell myself to buy fewer brushes, since the best portrait in the hall was clearly painted with about three.
On the way out I stopped at the museum shop and admired a postcard of the lady with the thoughtful look. I bought it, naturally. It now lives on my easel, where she supervises my work with an expression of mild doubt.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, Newsthump keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/