Portraiture, Body as Art

Portraiture defined

Portraiture defined is merely the practise of making portraits. This may not mean anything as the true meaning of portraiture is vast. Portraits are indeed painted to portray the relationship of differing personalities, to represent a particular time or moment, to produce a distinctive quality of importance, to create a theoretical identity of a person, to represent a cultural meaning of a person, to depict a religious situation and to investigate modern technologies. Different representations of people creating likeness or images that are universal are known as portraits. Not all representations of people are portraits as it requires a specific purpose in representing the particular person. While it is not always essential that a portrait presents the physical appearance of a person, it must always, in some way, demonstrate unique aspects of the appearance or character of its subject. "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter". (Oscar Wilde)

In fact, portraits do more than represent the physical appearance of the sitter. Being objective representations of the human structure, they can also be known as historical documents, status symbols, propaganda, objects of affection, psychological studies, conveying humour, achieving professional aims: career and prizes, commemorating achievement. The act of representing the physical appearance of the human form is the same as representing any other object to some artists. They are interested in only the formal qualities such as the problem solving aspects of having to portray the reality. Therefore, some artists are not interested to communicate the emotion of the person.

Self portraits are similar to portraits but it reflects on the artist's past and present lives as well as predicting the future. Generally, self portraits are drawn by artists to communicate their important times or issues that are raised in life. They also portray their meaning, which is their beliefs and interests, the consequences of the future or a dream. Self portraits most evident feature is the face of the artist him/her self. It displays their interests and their current view of life.

Portraits generally, have the use of documenting the appearance of people higher in status as in modern day; the important person is depicted in a photograph, in an event which makes them famous. Before the advent of photography, the practice of portraiture dates back many thousands of years to 1365BC. What is known as portraiture today has a close resemblance to the carving of the Egyptian pharaoh and his wife. The Egyptians have the oldest forms of portraits and sculptures for the use of funerals or as symbols of being immortal in tombs.

Ron Mueck

As a perfectionist, Ron Mueck has a tradition of constructing objects that seem real life all in a humanistic style. He initially worked with photography but abandoned it after he concluded that photography destroys the physical "presence" of the original object. Hence turned to the fine arts and sculpture. All of Mueck's works are out of scale from reality either undersized or oversized, but they tend to portray the super realism. He is known for his sculptures of people depicting themes such as: birth, youth, infancy, old age, middle age and death. From these themes, he creates his skilful works which portray gestures, poses and scale which are all significant as they fascinate the audience's emotions and helps them to understand the figure's personality. This being, he creates the artwork to react to something as he wants the viewers to react to the discomfort or comfort. Everyone will have their discomfort and comfort levels.

Ron Mueck aims for our personal reactions to the mental realism evoked by his works of portraits. His figures convey different types of emotional states as well as playing a powerful role of creating symbolism in our interpretations. Scale of Mueck's works is significant to the sculpture's location and the thought of our own body compared with that of the sculpture.

As a reference, Mueck recalls on his personal experiences as an inspiration for his works as well as his relations with his family. His new ideas of sculptures are a sign of the life like human figure in art history. Viewing his figures provides the audience with a personal experience themselves which stirs emotions and awakens memories.

The pregnant woman

Ron Mueck constructed the sculpture of pregnant woman as tribute to motherhood. Although being larger than life size, Mueck was careful not to make this picture too large for the audience. He wanted people to relate to the woman with their own ideas and not to see her as an oversized person. The imperfections of her body closely reveal the reality of his work. The universal theme associated with this sculpture is the contemporary portrayal of fertility, birth, goddess and life itself.

The eyes are closed to convey the inattentiveness and that the audience is unobserved by her. Furthermore, it reveals she is contemplating and allows us to imagine her own thoughts and feelings of tediousness and hardship. Having slack features, she looks exhausted and carefree of everything around her being weighed down literally by her exaggerated stomach carrying a baby as well as metaphorically by her thoughts. Exaggeration of her larger than life size body profoundly conveys to us the weight that she is bearing on her and the audience becomes aware of the burden and physicality of child bearing. Similarly, it portrays the monumentality and strength of the pregnant lady as well as her vulnerability and intensity. These create a strong connection between the work and the audience. Although Mueck's work highly represents the portraiture, he skilfully portrays the tense and urgent atmosphere in his sculpture. "A portrait, to be a work of art neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere... This links with the statement of Boccioni.

Casting the pregnant woman began with Mueck painting coloured polyester resin onto the inside of the mould. Using the pigments mixed with the resin, he started to create the look of the sculptures skin and fingernails. The realness of his work comes from the experimenting with different colours which represent the real human body during the time of occurrence. Over this thin layer, Mueck applied a thicker layer of resin which bonded to the coloured layer and he applied it thick enough to remove any evidence of the next layer of fibreglass being visible. As this layer of gel coat dried, fibre glass was applied and bonded with more resin for the structure and sturdiness of the sculpture. Hence, the mould was then