JW Gardner - Fine Oil Portraits

The Artist Talks About

Commissioned Oil Portraits

Among the most pleasing aspects of creating portraits is the challenge of capturing the likeness of the subject. But, "likeness" in a large, life-size, painterly portrait needs to do much more than simply recreate features and expression with reasonable precision. The aim of "likeness" in a successful portrait should be an impression of the character, personality and energy of the human subject. In group portraiture, this becomes even more challenging because the finished painting not only needs to capture these essential qualities in the individual personalities, but also involve itself with how these individuals are reacting with one another. A successful group portrait is really about a collective personality and affections, attitudes and emotions. It attempts to tell that story as far as it can be understood by the painter and those feelings and emotions conveyed thorough paint, color, gesture and the illustrated relationship of the figures.

The creation of a successful portrait requires that the painter think not simply as a painter, but as a biographer of sorts. Unlike a photograph which captures an instant in time, a painted portrait may attempt to encompass the perspective of a great deal of time. All of the interpretive powers of the artist come into play. A good modern portrait photographer may take fifty shots of the subject in an effort to capture one image that offers a deeper look into the personality of the subject. In contrast, the painter carries the mental images and the collected information of a thousand impressions and they are combined or knitted-together to produce a single painted impression of the subject.

I like to consider my portraits as an ongoing series of work with each one informing the next. I prefer to paint the subject frontally and close to life-size with the subject staring at the viewer as the viewer stairs back. My portraits are painted with energetic brush-strokes and thick paint while playing the illusion of implied space off of the flatness of the canvas. Like all paintings that attempt to project aspects of realism, my portraits are about reasonable precision. They engage the viewer and rely on the viewer to assemble the correct from the approximate and the incorrect. The interplay of color, brush stroke, paint and flatness compete for attention with likeness, correct anatomy and implied space and light. Like the painter Kandinski once said, the aesthetic experience involves the relationship between order and chaos and the viewer will hopefully enjoy my portraits on many different levels as the eyes wander over the surface of the finished painting in the ongoing amusement of discovering order.

Commissioned Individual & Group Oil Portraits

Family Portrait, 2004

36" x 36" Oil on Canvas

Private Collection

See: NORTH CAROLINA PORTRAIT PAINTER TALKS ABOUT HIS CRAFT

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