Every Day is Different

An occasional journal in words and pictures-14

Painting portraits gave me pleasure… until it became a minefield.

Friends would send me photos and trust me to do justice to them. I think the above picture of Alice, who loves the pink sakura blossom in springtime, did capture her refined nature. She was pleased with it, or at least she did not complain. Alice was one of many open and generous friends who set no conditions and let me experiment freely with them.

I was also able to get a good likeness of Calvin in Australia. His relatives near Melbourne wanted to honour him and they sent me this lovely photo.

My portrait perhaps made him a little fatter than he was in reality but I caught his sweet smile, his beautiful hands and his Gallipoli scarf.

I was mirroring my subjects. Masha didn’t mind when I mirrored her like this.

But then things started to go a bit pear-shaped. With the best of intentions, I painted this picture to congratulate Alyona and Daniil on the birth of their daughter Lisa. Alyona and Daniil came out quite well but poor little Lisa ended up looking like Queen Victoria. Her proud parents were less than thrilled.

My attempt to paint my family around the dining table also went down like a lead balloon. Somehow this cartoon was too close to the bone.

What was the problem? Why could I capture some people exactly and others not at all? Or rather, why did my subconscious bring them out in unflattering ways they were not going to like?

I began to realise that if a person was more or less the same on the outside as he or she was on the inside — in other words authentic; a “what you see is what you get” kind of person — then I had no trouble in painting them. But if they were wearing any kind of social mask, hiding another truth or vulnerability inside, this confused me or worse, provoked me to bring out that hidden truth.

This is not my painting — and I bow down to the superior artist who painted it —but it illustrates what I am talking about.

The final disaster came when a friend asked me to paint her and to “make her beautiful”. Of course, I could not help but make her ugly and she was duly offended. I will not offend her again by showing the picture here.

But truly, this was my “Gina Reinhart” moment. The offence was as great as when Vincent Namatjira painted the Australian mining magnate Gina Reinhart and the portrait she hated so much went viral.

After that, I decided in future it would be safer for me to paint flowers.