“I didn’t want the best players, I wanted the best team”
Today I was thinking of the process of choosing suitable subjects for portraits. It isn’t always easy, not everybody has a face for it.
Choosing people to paint for this project has been even more difficult, and has increased my workload in actually finding suitable people. The weight and breadth of the subject matter is not expressed in any one face of the many individuals I have encountered, it cannot be.
With limited wall space for my degree show the problem of addressing the variety and sheer amount of people affected by homelessness was beginning to trouble me. With the wall space available to me I would only be able to hang about six standard sized portraits and each face would be crucial, they would all have to be very strong in appearance and this in itself would be a misrepresentation of the issue of homelessness.
It was when researching contemporary portraiture that I found what could be the answer. Street artist Jef Aerosol found one solution to a different problem of how to bring street art into a gallery setting by exhibiting a large number of small portraits in a cluster, group or montage. This artist’s problem was one of how to keep some of the freshness and throwaway nature of the work in a more rarefied gallery atmosphere, the chaotic and seemingly random arrangements in size and style of portraits he chose were a very effective solution. Yes I had a different problem to this artist, but his solution to a different problem could also work very well for me. In choosing to exhibit a larger number of portraits in this way I would at once be representing in some way the number and variety of the people I needed to be painting. Not every portrait would have to carry heavy meaning all by itself, the weight of the subject matter could be carried collectively, some could be light, some could be barely working as individual portraits, but when displayed together they could be much more powerful.
I gathered together many of the smaller pieces I had been working on and tried them in different numbers and arrangements. Most worked well, but some worked better than others. The arrangement that I was most pleased with was one where all the faces looked directly out at the viewer. I found that when looking at this one, I felt a strong emotional reaction which I simply did not get looking at any one of the portraits on their own. I could not get away from or ignore them and provoking this reaction from the viewer was one of the very earliest aims of the project.
All in all this exploration has seemed like a real breakthrough and has given me plenty to consider when it comes to exhibiting.
