Primal Portraits
2013, oil on birch panel, 9 x 9 inches
Force Fields - Vicki Walsh's Primal Portraits
By Robert L. Pincus
Most basic definitions of a portrait describe it as a likeness of a person, animal or object in any medium -- visual, literary, cinematic, etcetera. More often than not, it is used in reference to a human likeness, of course, with emphasis on the face. To quote the most venerable source, The Oxford English Dictionary offers this as its lead definition: "a representation or delineation of a person, especially a face, made from life, by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etcetera; a likeness." 1
Yet there are nuances and subtleties that even the best dictionary definitions can't convey. Artist Vicki Walsh points to just such a subtlety when she says, "I am interested in faces outside of portraiture." 2
Most people, I have to think, generally consider a painting of a face as synonymous with a portrait. So why does she regard her meticulous renderings of faces as something outside of portraiture?
The answer is to be found in Walsh's approach to the face in her magnetic paintings. She is keenly attuned to the individuality of each subject, each person, so at the most essential level, she is a portraitist. Thus the term "primal portraits" suits her new series of paintings. But there is a social dimension to the portrait that is most often emphasized when we use the term, which sits outside of her focus. That is what her words emphasize. Walsh isn't trying to draw our attention to a person's biography and social trappings, even implicitly. (When she cites a subject's name in a title, she uses first name only.) Her primary subject is the face itself: its texture, its physiognomy, its color, and its deeply rooted connection to our own. Her secondary concern is the relationship of a face to the entire territory and structure of the picture, which has varied in intriguing ways from series to series.
In the Skin Deep series (2007), the ground was monochrome. In Beyond Appearances (2008), the paintings are punctuated by orbs of color floating throughout each picture, some of which overlap the faces. In Touching the Surface (2011), the entire picture - face and surroundings - contains a pale, delicate linear pattern derived from an Islamic source. The new series, Primal Portraits, surrounds each head with a circle, bringing to mind religious icons in the Christian tradition and their use of the shape as a symbol of eternity. But the effect, in each case, is to heighten our focus on the face in isolation, as the focus of our attention.
It follows that, while there is nothing overtly religious in her use of the form, the adaptation of this pictorial strategy heightens our sense of faces as symbolic types as much as specific likenesses. This series, more than earlier ones, represents a range of ages in its subjects, from young adulthood to old age, underscoring the notion of the series as a subtly allegorical spectrum of the human face, post-adolescence.
Stylistically, Walsh's stark rendering of faces is emphatically anti-idealistic. I have heard some viewers characterize her style as grotesque, but that is a misreading in my view. Her rendering of a face is simply and emphatically unvarnished. If a wrinkle or blemish exists on a given subject, she is going to include it.
The look of her pictures may be severe, but in a richly detailed fashion that references 15th century Northern Renaissance paintings by the likes of Jan Van Eyck and Hans Memling. In this respect, her work pays creative homage to history. Walsh's art also keys in to more recent currents: the hyperrealism of portraits by the likes of William Beckman and the concentrated construction of the face in Chuck Close's more conceptual paintings. One of Walsh's personal touchstones, Portrait of My Father (1972-79), an obsessively detailed and arresting portrait by conceptual artist and painter Stephen J. Kaltenbach, parallels her passion for the intensely observed likeness.
Like Close's portraits, Walsh's are conceptual, but in a different way. Where he makes us conscious of the construction of the face itself, she makes us think about the way faces are symbolic mirrors of our own. The design of her Primal Portraits, by echoing religious icons, gives this series a kind of haunting gravitas - whether the subject is young, old or in between.
She couples this strong sense of design with a faith in the power of craft. Walsh has relied on an approach that involves delicate lines and many layers of luminous oil technique and glazes. In this respect, she also evokes the refined technique of a Van Eyck or a Memling. Her intensive labors yield rewards: skin glows and color has a rich, almost atmospheric, look to it.
At its core, Walsh's art also exhibits a belief in the power of observation, informed in part by her earlier career as a medical forensic illustrator -- a profession that requires exacting skills in drawing. There is, in fact, always a trace of the drawn image in her faces and forms; in her Primal Portraits, she uses gold and silver, rather than graphite or charcoal, to define lines in her panels, evoking the prevalence of gold and silver leaf in historical religious icons.
In this series, faces take on a symbolic cast, an undercurrent in earlier work that is more pronounced here. The connective thread in all of her sustained attention to faces is because each series is their open-endedness. People are both individual and archetypal, so while each series is finite, it is potentially infinite. We can imagine more faces added to each. The effect is Whitmanesque in scope: each series contains -- or at least implies - multitudes. Most people in Primal Portraits meet our gaze, though not all. Some smile slightly, though most do not. All of them insist that we pay close attention, testifying to her keen powers of perception and her prolific technical gifts as a painter.
Underlying all of Walsh's art is the passion for the infinite variety of the face. But there is an evident fascination with what the viewer makes of those faces. As Walsh astutely observed in 2005, "For me, the painted face acts simultaneously as a projection screen and a mirror that reflects the viewer." 3 This remark was prescient, because the faces she has painted since then have given myriad forms to this idea. Or as she put it more recently, "I have an interest in people" - plural - " as a subject." 4
She has worked large, as in her arresting Touching the Surface series. In Primal Portraits, the size is modest. But the scale of a work doesn't determine impact or presence. I would suggest that these paintings turn faces into force fields that draw their power from the human clay and the way she shapes it so decisively.
End Notes
1. Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) 1146.
2. Vicki Walsh, personal interview, 14 December 2012.
3. Vicki Walsh, as quoted in Jamie Brunson, "Vicki Walsh: Reflections and Projections," unpublished essay, 2006, unpaginated.
4. Walsh, personal interview.
