Artists, historically, have made portrait paintings to record a sitter's appearance, but the subtext of portraiture is, invariably, declaring the power, beauty, wealth, profession, or character of their subjects. In her paintings, Vicki Walsh consciously subverts the conventions of Western portraiture-first, by making images that are more objective than flattering, and further, by removing from her subjects their jewelry, clothing, and surroundings, the obvious cultural trappings of class, role or status. She presents her subjects from the neck up, on a flat ground, pressed close to the picture plane; if clues about her subject's identities remain, they emerge in qualities like stance and gaze, and in subtly coded features like hairstyle, and skin. Where no other information exists, these understated clues signify, by turns, defensiveness or entitlement, asceticism or indulgence, openness or disdain.

Mirror, Mirror

In a 2005 statement, Walsh wrote, "For me, the painted face acts simultaneously as a projection screen and a mirror that reflects the viewer. I paint a likeness of a face, but what the viewer sees is ultimately what is already inside them."

Walsh begins each of her paintings by photographing her subjects; she asks them not to smile or pose for the camera, but to maintain an open or "neutral" expression. Regarding her decision to use photographs as working studies for her larger multi-panel installations, she has admitted, "I don't like this part of what I do, at all. When I ask people if they would mind being photographed for a painting, almost everybody objects, but then agrees--it's as if they have no choice. I usually pick people I know, because it's uncomfortable for me to do. It's also uncomfortable for the sitter. It's a hard thing to ask of somebody to witness their face."

Thus far her subjects have been people from her immediate circle: classmates and teachers from graduate school; her mother, sisters and nephew; her husband's family; her neighbors and friends. Among her real-life characters are numbered an executive for a publicly held company, a prep school student, a retired CFO, the chair of a graduate department, a World War II veteran. Some are manifestly underdogs--drinkers and smokers, possibly even drug users; others might be well-heeled members of the social register. Walsh translates her source photographs into meticulous pencil renderings on panels stretched with fine muslin, smoothly gessoed to create an almost glassy, paper-like surface.

Her formal training as a biomedical, or "forensic" illustrator enables her to create the illusion of "objective documentation", of simply recording unedited the observable physical facts of her sitters' faces. In a culture obsessed with glamour, idealized appearances, and manipulated presentation, her approach might be seen as ungenerous, even ruthless. She describes her method as that of "...an unbiased witness, just recording the facts. I try not to be critical, just to paint what I see."

Intriguingly, the detailed verisimilitude of Walsh's work renders the technical skill involved "invisible"-as viewers we're left to focus exclusively on the likenesses, losing track of the fact that there may be conscious positioning taking place in her compositions. While her paintings appear to be objective or documentary because of their accuracy, they're actually the product of careful editorial choices from a deliberate perspective. Her abrupt cropping to eliminate details is only the first of those thoughtfully considered manipulations. Walsh's deliberate pairing of specific sitters is a second form of intervention; these juxtapositions usually seem intended to maximize contrasts in the age, gender, or health of her sitters. In certain instances, as with her most recent series titled Good Looking, she appears to be using her matched pairs as complements that enforce typologies, or underscore genetic and cultural heredity.

Shoulder to Shoulder

The women in the seven panels that comprise her large 2004 installation, Women Over 50, may have, embedded in their likenesses, Walsh's oblique commentary on unconscious, culturally learned ageism, and on the premium placed by society on youth and glamour over maturity and lived experience. Certainly these images evoke these thoughts in any viewer who is herself a woman over fifty. It's a startling experience to see this many mature women looking back at the world, unsmiling; so accustomed are we to smiling, accommodating women, (and indeed, to being told to smile!) that their unyielding expressions feel like a call to arms. As a group, they're compressed into a tight, intimate space, nearly shoulder to shoulder, so that they almost read as an impenetrable barrier. One could imagine their stubborn defiance as they collectively confront the culture that declared them irrelevant.

Their collective outward look may be Walsh's sly inversion of the "possessive male gaze," turning cool appraisal and judgment back to the audience. Walsh included in this group her own self-portrait and that of a woman whose thinning hair implies that she has recently undergone radiation treatment. Discussing this piece, Walsh observed, "The relationship of the faces to one another is as important as the meaning of each individual face. As the viewer confronts the faces and the faces confront the viewer, the viewer's face becomes part of the group, just as my own face joins with others. My concerns with the boundaries and contiguities of any group of people have made me wonder how I myself am different in the context of the difference around me." This spectrum of women, from cancer survivor to permed grandmother, implies a range of possibilities and outcomes; putting herself among the others, Walsh seems to show that she is not above or outside the rules and circumstances that apply to them, either aesthetically or personally. The true radicalism of this installation is in her simple act of making women over fifty a worthy subject.

Myself Among Others

After completing Women Over Fifty, Walsh changed from an opaque, almost graphic style of painting to a more luminous, transparent oil technique, evocative of Northern Renaissance panels. Her colors have become jewel-like and saturated, and delicate pencil lines from her underlying drawings are visible in places through the veils of thin glazes. In the triptych wryly titled By Myself, composed of eight self portraits spread across three abutted panels, Walsh turned her objective treatment to her own image. The luminous glaze technique evokes Memling and Van der Weyden; the saturated turquoise background, seemingly matched to the color of her eyes, gives the group an arresting, almost supernatural quality as they look back at us. Seeing them side by side, duplicated, when we compare the expressions on these multiple Vicki Walshes they seem to alter from neutral to confrontational to disapproving, from defiant or tentative to receptive or closed. Every wrinkle, frown line and freckle is exactingly recorded. Her treatment of her own likeness, with so many nuanced shadings within a purposely-ambiguous expression, leaves us to wonder whether we can truly know a person from their outside in.

Family Tree

In her most recent series, Good Looking, Walsh has used paired family members as sitters to expand her investigation of gender and identity into class, economics, heredity and family dynamics. These pairs from her intimate circle-whether parent & child or brother & brother--- illustrate that shared DNA may produce physical similarities, but external circumstances (lifestyle, gender and generational difference, identification with cultural stereotypes, or the perks of class privilege) reshape what nature has wrought. Although Walsh again started with "neutral" images, these faces reveal how personal history and amore propre manifest in carriage, expression, and deeply internalized attitudes, despite any efforts to disguise them. Some of these faces suggest that we can't hide who or what we are or have become, no matter how much cropping or editorial intervention takes place. Like a film director, Walsh's behind-the-scenes decisions create a controlled, deliberate narrative--as her audience, we see what is visible but can only infer what has been manipulated or left out. Because her subjects address the viewer, and not each other, Walsh effectively delimits our information about the personal relationships between them. As the art historian Mark Levy has commented, "The ambiguity of the relationships between her characters invites speculation because the information is minimal. There's enough information to suggest a story, but not so much that you know exactly what it is, so her figures become metaphorical."

Walsh asserts that she sees "an individual identity in every face, a life, a perception of their life, a story. Each face is utterly distinct, ripe with nuance and affect." Her paintings are psychological as much as they are physiological descriptions, open to her audience's interpretation to complete the stories that they infer. Finally, in presenting individuals unvarnished and unadorned, she exposes the influences of the culture around us--the invisible values that we internalize, the values that shape our judgments of others, the unconscious values that separate us from our common humanity.

Jamie Brunson is an artist based in the Bay Area.