New year is here. And now Covid-19! I’ve just turned 80. What am I going to do WITH MY ART in 2020?

This past December 3rd, it has been my good fortune to present an exhibition of twelve new sketches of fishing boats at Fisherman’s wharf here in Victoria BC. All done during the good weather in Victoria this past September, but now I’m thinking portraits!

Thinking portraits. Yes, Portraits. Faces. Funny how drawing fishing boats is like drawing faces. Each boat has its own personality: windows at the front are like eyes and the relationships must be right to get a likeness. Over the front windows are “eyebrows”.
I’ve always liked figure drawing but have shied from doing faces in any detail. And figures are like boats, they have curves you must represent in space, intuiting perspective.
Yet throughout my life and particularly in the 1970s SELF portraits were important. Occasionally a stranger would sit for me in my studio.

Photography changed portraiture. Algorithms can recognize faces. Reconstructions of faces are being made from DNA information, but what is it that captures the uncanny humanness, what is it that an artist can bring to a rendering that expresses, inspires, transcends?
Can one look for a way to capture the essence of a human being, that “likeness of spirit” ideally in as few moves as possible. Comics, and caricatures can do that as can expressionist works.
For those of you interested in philosophy, my inspiration comes from Jewish Lithuanian French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas where “The First Philosophy is Ethics, not epistemology”. He has written about how THE FACE is how we encounter the OTHER.

So here was my thinking before covid 19:
Persons willing to sit for a portrait can do that and keep the painting at the end if they like it. Yes, I need practice. I will sign the works. Sitting time about two hours but with good rest breaks. I will keep a photograph of the finished work.
Now, in this period of pandemic I invite you to pull out a mirror as I have done and do a self portrait. Record your own face as a record of this time when you lived through this incredible moment of history!