Skin Deep
THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
Up Close and Personal
Vicki Walsh's portraits in 'Skin Deep' are a statement of style
By Robert L. Pincus | Art Critic
May 3, 2007
You aren't actually getting to know a person through a portrait, in any literal way, but convincing artists make us feel as if we are. In some cases, a portraitist shows us something about a sitter that he or she doesn't know about themselves or doesn't want to reveal.
Yet in the end, are you getting to know more about the subject or the artist?
Oscar Wilde once said, “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter.”
This insight, keen as it is, can't be applied in a uniform way. But when style is distinctive, it's hard not to think about the artist more than the person in the picture – and this is the case with paintings by Vicki Walsh.
“Skin Deep,” at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Library in Pacific Beach, is the first solo exhibition for the San Diego-based artist, who recently completed an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her portraits are a statement of style, with their intense attention to the terrain of a face.
Everyone's pose is frontal. Every subject is seen from the neck up. Every face is deadpan. And every person is rendered against a one-color background, in stark light.
The results are arresting. “Clara” is elderly, the sides of her face thick with wrinkles and her neck heavy with folds. Her eyes are kindly, her expression less harsh than most of Walsh's subjects.
Walsh, in “My Self,” has painted her own face on a larger scale than anyone else's. The attention to detail is just as uncompromisingly clinical, with the wrinkles near her lips and each furrow on her lower forehead as distinct as her blue eyes.
Her approach takes us back to the 1970s, when superrealism and photorealism had a prominent run and Chuck Close came to prominence because of his arresting portraits and self-portraits. But Walsh's insistence on being uncompromisingly clinical moves beyond realism, toward a severe view of the human form that is subtly grotesque, in the manner of 16th-century Late Gothic paintings by the likes of Lucas Cranach or Matthias Grünewald.
Even if Clara's face suggests an inner sweetness, the rendering of her accentuates the ravages of time. In Walsh's self-portrait, the harshness is uninhibited. (Tellingly, Walsh is far more friendly and attractive in person.) “Buffy” is a more restrained interpretation of a face, closer to the gentler look of Walsh's pale, haunting pencil drawings.
The show contains 27 paintings, all in oil on birch panel, and five small drawings of some of the same subjects. Paintings are arranged in rows as if to highlight facial types. Some double portraits do the same thing within a single picture. One ends up wondering, with a painting like “Pat/Rich,” whether the men really do look similar or we think they do because she presents them in the same strong style.
Whatever the case, this show has a way of sticking with you. Walsh isn't a groundbreaker in the genre, but she combines technical prowess with passion. The paintings reveal her intense fascination with the human face, mirrored darkly, and in that sense this exhibition is a self-portrait.
