E-Mail Us

Winter Quarter Essay — January 2007

On Portraiture
by Andrew Rush   ©2006

"…the more we measure, the more accurately we see what things are actually like-has been what we have meant by humanism since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and Darwin is one of its greatest exponents and examples. "
Adam Gopnik, Rewriting Nature: Darwin's Personal Evolution (New Yorker, Oct 23, 2006)

In his recent brilliant essay in The New Yorker, author Adam Gopnik notes how Charles Darwin led his Puritan age to the irreversible precipice of his thesis of natural selection in The Origin of the Species, not by the academic language of science, but by "this enterprise of looking for the low." Gopnik points out that "Darwin looked for evidence in the homely, the overlooked, the undervalued" starting with the "largely working-class London and Birmingham pigeon- breeding enthusiasts…from whom he learned much of what we read in the first part of The Origin."

As a drawing teacher, I too feel a strong kinship with Darwin's confidence in the spirit of his pigeon-breeders who shared their observations with each other over a pint at the bar, rather than in scientific papers. The people at The Drawing Studio are close relatives of Darwin's scientific family, people of all ages and walks of life, holding up their pencils in that old but personally effective means to measure what one sees, and thus become more able to represent the visual world a little better.

In fact, this 'squinting through the pencil' is even now sometimes ridiculed as a cliché of popular art learning by some modern art 'academics' who (like Darwin's scientific colleagues) still rest their case upon a postmodern version of the classic profile, the ideal landscape, or perfectly balanced composition of parts.

But if there is one branch of learning to draw which raises every question about 'seeing what things are actually like', it has to be found in the practice of portraiture. One of the last studio exercises I offer to my groups in the drawing fundamentals cycle is to ask each person to draw a simple self-portrait from a mirror. I might add that this exercise is assigned late in the course, following many weeks of skill building in measurement, observation and tools, but up until that point always from the simple objects of everyday life-bottles and flowers, boxes and books, chairs and tables.

On that portraiture day, however, it is as if everything learned up to this point falls apart--for some accompanied by emotional chaos, upset and confusion. Draw myself? Impossible! That can't be me in the mirror! Certainly not those folds and wrinkles of flopping chins and creases and pimples. And certainly I'm not that old, and even worse than old, an unfair penetration of what I have been carefully editing with hair, make-up and other ministrations.

And that is precisely the value of learning to draw one's face. It is just because it so dramatically reveals the chasm that exists between the stereotypes that literally mask the reality of one's own visage, the chasm between assumptions and what's there. Especially this first self portrait draws up, from the dark and often unexamined morass of the past, everything I avoid seeing about myself, rudely pushing past those old stereotypes that I have carefully pasted over the facts of aging and change.

The up side is that after the first shock and recovery comes a kind of emotional release as the student begins to understand that true compassion in life and art is much deeper than the superficially pretty. For example, all his life Rembrandt frequently drew or painted himself, indeed left us one of the finest records of the deep beauty that is in the process of our own aging.

Time after time we have seen in our students this release from the bondage of youth that begins with the study of portraiture, and then flows out into all of their work with an intensity of feeling and compassion that energizes the core of all great art. It is in this spirit that we study portraiture at The Drawing Studio as not only a deeper cut into the nature of 'likeness' in oneself and one's sitters, but an avenue of vision into a truer understanding of the spiritual roots of all life that is the foundation of the scientific revolution begun by Charles Darwin.

©2005 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reproduced in any form without permission