This statement was written for the Parent Portraits exhibition at Westbeth Gallery, NY, NY May-June 2019
If you are privileged (or perhaps unfortunate) enough to claim a close familial connection to an aspiring portrait artist, then you should know that at some point you will certainly be beholden to sit for that person. It is a responsibility that parents and siblings of artists must accept, embrace, or endure, depending on your viewpoint, and it is a well-established tradition. For students of portraiture, especially young students, availability is no doubt the number one quality one looks for in a sitter.
While this role has also been assumed by close friends and lovers, siblings and parents by virtue of temporal and physical proximity have often had little say in the matter. There are few ways to hide from a young and ambitious portraitist, at least one that you live with, who wants to practice on you. I’m sure that my own mother, after birthing her eighth child at the age of 41, did not imagine in that moment that she would be adding to her countless other parental duties the job of portrait sitting, a job that would repeat many times.
Parent portraits are interesting because they are atypical manifestations of a typical relationship, an irregular way to reflect on a bond which is regular to human experience. In general, a painting provides an opportunity to meditate on a subject, both in the act of its creation and in the viewing of it after its completion. Every act of painting provides an opportunity to test what one notices, pays attention to, cares about. The painting is a kind of mindful rehearsal of one’s own personal experience. In the case of parent portraiture, the relationship of painter to subject may be pronounced differently. The relationship may be more the subject than the actual subject. Viewing a painting of someone else’s mother might make me reflect on my relationship to my own mother. This has happened to me recently.
A hypothesis I haven’t yet tested is that historically most paintings of parents were painted while the painter was young. Freud and Mancini are notable exceptions.
My mother politely informed me a couple of paintings of her ago that she was no longer interested in sitting for me. She wasn’t angry. She has over the years taken the same kind of motherly interest in my painting that any mother might take in any of her child’s activities, the same kind of interest that might compel a parent to suffer a little league baseball game, for example. Painting was never a particular interest of hers. Her interest in my painting and her attendant parental responsibility to it, had simply expired.
I’ve met precious few folks in my experience who actually enjoy sitting. Regardless of the pose and regardless of how easy it may look from the outside, sitting is always demanding, tiring, and sometimes just plain boring. My mother’s expressed reluctance to sit did not surprise me, but it was disappointing nonetheless. Firstly, I spend summers in Alabama for the primary purpose of being near her. Secondly, I have only recently come to feel I might use a portrait sitting as an opportunity to visit with my sitter. Because I might be concentrating, or frustrated, I would seldom, until recently, attempt to engage my sitter in a conversation while I was painting. I might paint my sitter in stony silence, or while listening to music, to books, or podcasts (providing to them some relief) and in my mother’s case: while listening to sermons. I’m not sure how many times I’ve painted or drawn my mother. Mostly, I was still hoping one day to make a painting of her that I liked.
If you ask her age, my mother will tell you she’s 19. In actual regular-people years, she is 88. Heartless declaration notwithstanding, as recently as last summer my mother offered to sit for me. I had not asked. I was generally musing that I needed a sitter so that I could think about what I wanted to do for an upcoming portrait class, and I think a motherly sense of responsibility kicked back in. She did sit, and we did visit, and at last, I made a drawing of her that pleased me somewhat. The painting in this show is from 2014 (I think). I hope something of her spirit is suggested in her gesture and expression.
A painter might long for many qualities in a sitter: easy to be with, interesting to look at, interesting to talk to, reliable, cheap. My mother, still available, is much more. Thoroughly complex, at once loving and intensely individual, kind but powerfully present, simultaneously spiritual and physically energetic, my mother remains an elusive likeness.
Drawing of my mother, 2018, charcoal on paper, 22” x 30”