As a portrait artist belonging to a time where the likeness of a person can be created digitally and stored as a file on a computer, the importance of my genres traditional aim in capturing ‘likeness’ seemingly decreases. My work explores how the hyper-digitalised society of today has impacted the value of visual legacy more broadly.
Historically portraiture conveyed information relating to the sitter through a semaphore like language of symbolism, susceptible to fade and become incomprehensible with time. Today, the digital portrait’s interaction with language is one of total utility. Binary runs through its pixels like blood through flesh; but both analogue and digital likenesses deal with data in the captured record of the person. Considering the fluid nature of data exchange in the contemporary world in relation to obsolescence or change in language presents questions as to how the visual legacy can be altered, corrupted, or even doctored. The rise of AI and the process of machine learning places the computer as an artistic automaton – manipulating and corrupting the sitters face, a true resurrection of the fear originating from portraiture’s historic association with counterfeiting.
Exploring the extent of which a digitalised existence intersects with the moment-based aspect of capturing likeness, my portraiture questions it’s values as a legacy preserving process in a digitalised society. Interpreting the portrait as both a demonstration of visual information and an exercise of trust, both between myself and sitter and painting and viewer, I intend to capture a moment of change in the sitter’s life. This focus on trust and process challenges its own objective truths as a definitive visual representation in a society where it’s increasingly corruptible. To summarise my practice, I portray my sitters as entities changing and shifting through their life in their environment in their moment. The work empathetically acknowledges it’s sitters as living humans but challenges its own authority and sincerity as a visual legacy.
