Category: Thoughts on Art

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A General Discussion of the Portrait Process

As I’ve said on my website, I believe a portrait is a celebration, of love, of life, or of achievement. Nobody is too unimportant or ordinary to be celebrated,  for we are all valued by those who care for us. To own a portrait is not to be vain, but to acknowledge that the subject matters to those who care for them, whether in a family context or in business.

Reluctant Sitters

If you’re nervous about being the subject of a portrait – don’t be.

Everyone is unique. Each one of us is worth celebrating. No one is not “important” enough to be portrayed or “beautiful” enough. If someone has commissioned a portrait of you its because you are important or beautiful or special to them.

I’ve never had a sitter who did not enjoy the experience looking back, no matter how uncertain they were going in.

To Smile or Not to Smile?

A flashing smile may work in a photograph – it captures 125th of a second, and our eye accepts that – we are used to photographic images. We know a painting represents many hours of work so what we believe in for 125th of a second becomes less believable over hours, weeks or months. It can work, and increasingly portraits include them, but in traditionally its best avoided. That’s not to say you can’t have a hint of a smile or a pleasant expression in a portrait but it should be natural and not forced.

The fact is no one sitting for a portrait from life can hold a toothy smile for hour after hour, this is why you see so few smiling portraits before the age of photography.

It’s definitely not about ego

Portraits are very, very rarely about vanity or ego, very few are commissioned by the subjects themselves, though occasionally a parent commissioning a portrait of their child, or a partner commissioning one of a loved one, can be persuaded to be part of the picture. Portraits are more often about the feelings of someone else for the subject so there is no vanity involved. I have never had someone say “paint me because I am beautiful”.

Of the people who commission portraits of themselves, almost all did so as an enquiry into themselves, a taking stock of who they had become, an exploration or right-of-passage.

Each of us is worth celebrating in this way. We all matter to someone, each of us has a story that deserves to be told. There is no ego in that.

Telling the Story

Often the subject themselves is enough in a portrait – their face tells the story of their lives as eloquently as a novel. The right pose and lighting will bring out that story. Sometimes adding background elements can help say a little more. A landscape for someone who loves the outdoors; a garden for someone who created it; maybe a beautiful home seen in the distance; mementos from a career; or props from a career in progress that help identify the profession of the sitter; or perhaps a part of the institution or office building they work in.

Choosing this setting should be part of the collaboration with the artist.

Keep it simple – don’t clutter a painting with so much that it detracts from the sitter – they are the subject, not the car, the house, the boat, dog, cat, and distant forest.

Anything you include should have meaning and help the picture. If it weakens the image, leave it out.

Depth – A painting should continue speaking to you

Any good portrait should make a viewer feel they know the sitter, that this is a person you’d like to know better. You might have a pose with the subject looking off into a distance or away from the viewer – what are they thinking? What held their interest out of the frame? A little mystery, or a little good humour, is engaging and keeps us coming back for more.

And in years to come, when you look back at when this picture was made, it should take you back to that time, those thoughts, and help you remember who the subject was then and how you felt about them, or to ponder your younger self and reflect on all that you did not know back then and what your dreams were.

The importance of a preparatory sketch

As I have said all through this website, making any portrait is a collaboration between the artist, the subject(s), and the person commissioning it. The best way to be sure everyone is on the same page, before the final painting is begun, is through a compositional sketch. Looking at a preparatory sketch, you will be able to see exactly what your artist has planned, so that there will be no surprises at the end.

A sketch gives everyone a chance to make changes if anything does not feel right, before too much time is put into the painting itself.

If I find I have more than one strong idea of how a painting might work, I often make two sketches, to give my clients a choice of approach. These sketches need not be very finished, but they should give an accurate idea of where everything is going to fit on the final canvas. This is particularly important for a group portrait where there are so many problems to solve, or when working from photographs back at the artist’s studio, where a client will not see the painting process itself (in live sittings the painting is taking shape before your eyes so changes can be made early into the process if necessary).

Once a sketch has been approved the painting should follow its layout so it will look as expected at the end.

Some artists who work exclusively from photographs will assemble the image they are going to work from in Photoshop and show you this image for your approval before they begin.

Of course, ideas evolve in the making, and a finished painting is more complete than a preparatory sketch. When a painting is complete, there may be one or two small and subtle changes you’d like made. An artist who guarantees their work and your satisfaction will happily make these.

Obviously, it is not reasonable for a client who has a approved a compositional sketch to decide they want a completely different composition when they see the finished picture – the sketch approval process protects everyone including the artist, from this. Small changes, to expression, for example, are reasonable requests.

Timing – The Artist’s Schedule

Most busy artists will be able to tell you when you can reasonably expect your portrait to be completed before they begin. If you have a deadline – an unveiling date for example – in mind, they should be able to arrange their schedule to meet it, or tell you honestly if it will not be possible.

Some artists are booked many months – ever years – in advance, but they will help you plan a completion date for your project.

It is usual for artists to take a deposit, representing a commitment from you as they commit to securing your place in their schedule.

Images of paintings and
photographs by David Goatley
are copyright David Goatley

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Colour & Perception – Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” and Peter Jacksons’ “They Shall Not Grow Old”

Art is many things to many people. I’ve heard it described as a celebration of beauty, which is a joyous thing. Beauty is something we all need more of in our lives. What we don’t need more of is superficiality – there’s more than enough of that surrounding us already.

Art can be ugly too. It can be difficult, challenging, confrontational, thought provoking, political, religious, irreligious, complex or simple. It can be purely entertaining or deeply profound. It can make an immediate, readily understood impact, or require a major effort of understanding on the part of a viewer. Sometimes the less there is on a canvas, the longer the accompanying label seems to grow.

For me, one way of thinking about art is to understand it as the application of intelligence, technique and creativity to a subject to make you see the truth of it in a new way.  The familiar becomes new. We see something we thought we knew differently and are forced to think about it afresh. Sometimes it can upend our perceptions or make us face something we had not wanted to see. Or it can make us realize that something we barely saw at all is meaningful and worth looking at with new eyes. It seems to me that the best art begins with a strong idea – it is about something.

Image from the movie Roma by Alfonso Cuaron showing a woman and children in a car
Movie still from Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma. Photo: NETFLIX

These thoughts don’t just apply to painting, but to all forms of artistic expression.  I am a painter, but I really love film – for me film was the great artistic medium to emerge in the last century. Obviously, it can be a visual feast, but it can also be highly literary. Great films take us into places we may have never been, bring us alongside other lives in ways that are visceral and real and engage our emotions powerfully just as literature or music does.

I was lucky enough to see two films in the past few days – each using the power of colour artfully to make us see something differently.  Roma, Alfonso Cuaron’s black and white homage to the maid that raised him, is beautiful to look at. Imagine every great photographer you care to think of contributing a little, frame by frame. You could freeze it almost anywhere and simply appreciate the still image.  

Image from the movie Roma by Alfonso Cuaron showing a woman and child lying below a line of laundry
Movie still from Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma. Photo: NETFLIX

Shooting a film in black and white abstracts each moment and makes another, almost nostalgic, reality   of it, forcing you to concentrate on light and composition. It is consciously a look and feel from a time that is past, accentuating that this is art made of memory, in a way.  The performances are powerful too – no wonder this is hotly tipped for an Oscar.  It is available on Netflix.

Image partially colorized from film footage of WWI from the movie They Shall Not Grow Old. Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment
Photo: Warner Bros. Entertainment

Meanwhile, adding colour to footage that was black white and has left all of us with a collective memory of a black and white war that took place impossibly long ago, when people were grainy and indistinct and moved like marionettes, is a stroke of genius in Peter Jacksons’ “They Shall Not Grow Old”. It brings the reality of a war that is sliding beyond living memory screaming into the present and forces you to confront the living, breathing, humanity of these men and the hell they lived through.

Colorized film footage of WWI men resting behind the lines from the movie They Shall Not Grow Old. Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment
Photo: Warner Bros. Entertainment

I remember the old men those young men became, remember talking to my grandfather who went through the entire war and was forever altered by it. It was only yesterday, really, and now they are all gone. This is a film that will show future generations who never knew these men that they were more than characters in a history book.

I can’t quite believe a film of this outstanding quality was screened for just two days, in limited theatres, with almost no advertising. Despite this, the screening we attended in Victoria was sold out and left its audience profoundly moved. Peter Jackson worked with the Imperial War Museum Film and the BBC Sound archives to create a vivid, unforgettable and never before seen telling of the war on the western front by those who were there. The War Museum had asked him to make “something” out of their 100 hour archive of grainy black and white, hand-cranked camera, silent footage. Their only brief was “make it a fitting tribute to the centenary of the war and make it something we haven’t seen before”.

Colorized film footage of a trench in WWI from the movie They Shall Not Grow Old. Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment
Photo: Warner Bros. Entertainment

Working with his digital processing and effects people in NZ. He first of all took that aging and deteriorating footage and cleaned it up, then corrected all the various shooting speeds to a believable 24 frames a second, before colouring it, so that it lives like never before.  Of course, the original film is silent, so he had actors read the words – captured by lip readers – of those seen speaking and authentic sounds added, so that the mud squelches, the shells whine and explode and the guns chatter and the soldiers laugh and joke with us.  The result brings these men gloriously alive and makes their deaths freshly poignant and senseless…

The film is voiced by a carefully edited commentary from around 100 British soldiers, telling it like it was, the horrors and the humour, the everyday realities, the dreams and nightmares, the camaraderie, the loss, the inability to ever share it all with civilians when they came home. I don’t think there can have been a dry eye in the house. It is a simply stunning achievement and will surely become the definitive telling of what it was like to be a part of that war as an ordinary soldier. There is no history of battles, no attempt to explain what it was all about, no Generals, no tactics, just those voices reminiscing, often with good humour or great sadness – what it was like to join up, train, then live and fight in trenches.  This is how it was. I’ve read a great deal about that war and have a vivid imagination, but this put you on the spot and confronted you like no reading can.

This is art. A masterpiece. See it if you can.

Now, how to make art with a brush that speaks like these films? What a challenge!

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A Question of Identiy

Self Portrait at 60
Self Portrait by David Goatley: “So Many Selves at 60″, Oil on linen, 40″ x 30”

Identity is not fixed. Here I explored the evolution of my own identity over the years, asking “Am I still the person I see in these previous incarnations of myself?”

Identify is often in the news these days, identify politics, gender identity, the ongoing discussion of racial or religious identity, and whether such things should even be noted or discussed.

Portraits, of course, have always been about identity. Who is this person? Who is revealed behind those eyes? Which begs the question – how much of their true self does the sitter reveal? And can an artist hope to discover a truth behind the person the subject appears to be? We all adopt different personas for different situations. We have public and private faces. The person our families know and love may not be the person we are in business. Actors make a profession of convincing us they are other people, but we are all performers to some degree.

Oil painting of a Japanese born Canadian immigrant with cultural symbolism
“Culture Shift” by David Goatley: Oil on linen, 36″ x 24″

Just recently I had the chance to work with a lovely Japanese lady who has been a Canadian for almost as l long as I – an Englishman – have. She kindly modelled for a workshop I gave and I painted a loose demo oil sketch of here there, which set me thinking about a way of portraying here between the two cultures, in the act of becoming Canadian whilst also being Japanese.

It’s something I, as an immigrant, have thought about a lot – I’m proudly Canadian, but undeniably and thoroughly English and, as I get older, my roots call more insistently. I’ve been making paintings that play with this identity question for quite a while. I’d like to talk about a few of these pictures on the eve of an exhibition at the Union Club of British Columbia that will include 4 of them.

Travis is the kind of guy – you might think – who would be scary to get on the wrong side of. Powerfully built, with a shaved head, you might cast him as a bouncer in a gritty TV drama, but appearances are not the whole story; that smile gives it away, far from fearsome, Travis is a gentle giant.

Painting of a strong but gentle man
“The Gentle Giant” by David Goatley: Oil on linen, 36″ x 24″

Yes, he has enormous arms and shoulders from earlier as a fisherman, but he’s a good natured, kind soul who know works as a special effects artist in the video game industry. He’s one of Sharon’s oldest friends and I painted this study from life when he came up from Atlanta to visit recently, using a very simple palette of predominantly earth colours.

Duncan Regehr is an actor with a long stream of TV and movie roles to his credit but he’s also a painter, sculptor and poet. His own paintings have often featured multiple representations of the same person, so I chose to incorporate this idea into my exploration of his multiple identities.

Painting of "Duncan Regehr" by David Goatley: Oil on canvas, 40" x 30"
“Duncan Regehr” by David Goatley: Oil on canvas, 40″ x 30″

Nick is my daughter’s partner and, like many young people, his identity is a work in progress. His own heritage is mixed and he has added another element to that mix by being adopted into one of our First Nations, where he shares proudly in the ritual of the Sundance with his adoptive father.

With his dreadlock and Rastafarian tattoos, the most obvious visual identity he presents is West Indian – his mother’s roots, and yet spiritually he is closer to the people we once called Indians and now recognized as our First Peoples.

Painting of a Sundancer
“Sundancer” by David Goatley: Oil on linen, 36″ x 24″

Hanif Kureishi, CBE, is one of England’s finest contemporary writers, both as a novelist and for theatre and film. You may remember his Oscar nominated movie “My Beautiful Launderette” – and if you haven’t read his novel “The Buddha of Suburbia” you should. Most of Hanif’s work has dealt with questions of identity as his own experience of growing up as the son of an Indian father and English mother in a time of heightened racial tension gave him a unique view of what identity might mean. Here, I’ve captured him at his writing desk gazing out over the streets of Sheppard’s Bush in the London he loves.

"Hanif Kureishi" by David Goatley: Oil on canvas 36" x 24"
“Hanif Kureishi” by David Goatley: Oil on canvas 36″ x 24″

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The Captive

Portraits can be powerful tools. Think of the endlessly reproduced giant faces of Chairman Mao, Stalin or Hitler that were designed to make them seem all seeing and all powerful. Omnipresence through image. Or the portraits of kings and nobles, painted to project majesty and power – or, perhaps, the gentle faces of all those Madonnas or metaphysically detached Christs, designed to be venerated and adored.

Portraits can be part of revolutions too, remember those glorious proletarian banner carriers of Soviet art, or Liberty leading the people in Delacroix’s famous painting? These images are meant to provoke, or encourage, to reinforce some kind of belief, they were never merely beautiful, although some of them undoubtedly are. Sometimes a face can focus us on a cause, can give a recognizable personality to something that seemed impersonal and remote. Putting a human face to an issue can make all the difference in how we engage with it.

Most of the time my own work does not aspire to such lofty ideals, the everyday life of a portrait painter is about celebrating the love or admiration we have for one another, either on a personal level or in recognition of more public achievements, but every now and again I am given the opportunity to paint something that seeks to make a difference. I can look back gratefully at the group portrait I made of Haitian orphans that was part of a fund-raising campaign that rebuilt their orphanage, or the portrait of a Hausa King that has helped open doors to aid and relief work where none was possible before and be glad I could help in some small way.

This past week I was at my studio away from home, in rural Connecticut, when I was asked if I would consider painting Leah Shabiru.

In the Connecticut studio (photo by Lee Cantelon)

Leah is a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who was kidnapped in a raid by Boko Haram, Nigeria’s terrifying Islamic militant group, back in February of this year. Many other girls were taken with her, but they have all been released. Leah alone remains captive because she refuses to renounce her Christian faith. Unlike every other instance where Boko Haram have seized the headlines by kidnapping girls, this time we have a name. All those other girls, numbering in the hundreds, taken over the past few years and subjected to every imaginable indignity and trauma, remain largely anonymous – especially to the outside world. The suffering of all those girls has been terrible and many of those released have been left physically and mentally scarred for life. Only their families and those who work to bring help to them know who they are. Leah could be the face for all of them – a face to build a campaign around perhaps. But there is only one photograph of her and it does not tell the story that needs to be told. I felt I had to try to make a picture that did.

Looking at that one picture of Leah, taken in happier times, dressed in a white and yellow turban, glasses pushed high on her forehead, and a vivid silk shirt – I saw a snapshot of a pretty girl enjoying life – innocent and lovely. Thankfully it does not hint at her present condition. I did not want to simply copy someone else’s picture of a girl I have never met, but to find a way of portraying a brave girl in an unimaginable situation, a girl whose faith is all she has to cling to.

The first painting underway (photo by Lee Cantelon)

For two days I worked on a small painting in which I changed the colours of her clothes and reimagined a setting, trying to make something new, that would be my own, out of the limited reference available. At the end of the second day I felt that, whilst a picture was taking shape, something was missing, it wasn’t telling the story I needed to tell. I went to bed anxious and uncertain, knowing that Peter Fretheim, the missionary who had hoped I could make this painting, would be here the following evening, eager to see what I had done. It didn’t help that Lee Cantelon, my good friend who had introduced us, had told Peter a picture was taking shape and had emailed pictures of work in progress enthusiastically. It was a night of uneasy dreams.

I awoke early with a clear vision of a very different painting in my head. I hurried over to the studio and looked at the picture I’d spent the last two days on. Could it be altered to fit this new vison? I made a few tentative strokes and realised that last night’s paint was still too wet to take the massive alterations I had planned. I hesitated, there was so little time. I went back into the house and made some tea. What to do? I had a painting that could be completed, but I was now certain it was not the painting I wanted.

I had missed what I was aiming for. I had to trust the vision I had woken with, to try and get what I had seen out and onto a fresh canvas in just a few short hours if I wasn’t going to disappoint everyone, including myself.

Luckily, Leah’s face was now familiar to me. The struggles I’d had with painting her colouring had begun to resolve in the first portrait and I began again with all I had learned in mind, knowing both what to avoid and with a clear idea of where I was going. I painted hard and fast, closing my eyes occasionally to see the painting inside my head more clearly. Three hours later I had the sense to stop. As I sat back I heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Lee came in moments later. “Did you finish it?” he asked. I pointed to the new painting on the easel. “Wow, you’re kidding me” he said, ‘that wasn’t here this morning. Where did that come from?” I could only point upwards and smile.

Leah Shabiru, Captive for Christ

Yes, it is a sketch, it isn’t beautifully finished, and yes, some of the modelling in the face could be further refined, but the painting, loose as it is, tells the story. Leah Shabiru, Captive for Christ.

Peter and his wife Miriam, who know the Shabiru’s, were thrilled. They felt this was an image that they could use widely to raise awareness of Leah’s story and give a face to what is happening in that troubled region. I can only hope it helps make part of the difference they are trying to achieve. I’m just glad to have had a chance to do this, glad that sometimes paintings can make a difference and thankful for the vision that came with the morning.