Painful Portraits

Edvard Munch, "The Sick Child," oil on canvas, 1885

Many family portraits are done for practice, as I mentioned in the previous post. Young artists from Degas to Dali did portraits of family when they were young aspiring artists. Of course, many were and are made not as formal portraits the way commissions are, but more as personal views of the individuals depicted. Such portraits seek something innate of the individual to suggest or depict. Many are celebratory. Some portraits, though, are made to work through feelings or ideas. Edvard Munch painted his beloved older sister when she was mortally ill with tuberculosis, for example. Some are grieving posthumous portraits like Claude Monet did ("Camille on her Deathbed"). Whatever the family circumstance, these are difficult paintings to see.

In my own archives are two family portraits that are painful but provide good examples of  work. They were done as meditations on each of the two family members, as ways of exploring feelings and triggering memories. Each of these remains in my own private collection. One is a sort of premonition and the other is posthumous. The first is an oil portrait of one of my brothers, who now has significant pulmonary disease. This portrait, painted from sketches and personal references, was done years before his disease progressed but after its ravages had already begun. He is pale and grey-pink--he had begun to fade away before our eyes, even then. Today he looks more like this portrait than ever and he lives on constant oxygen.

Hoff, "Portrait of the Artist's Brother," oil on panel, 12x16

The second portrait is actually a drawing rather than a painting. So far in my own practice I've only made a single posthumous work, the silverpoint drawing posted below. Although it is titled "The Dying Woman" and not called a portrait, the drawing is based on sketches of my mother's final weeks of suffering from metastatic lung cancer.

Hoff, "The Dying Woman," silverpoint, 8x6

Common to each of these, the cause of disease was cigarette smoking.