I think I am just starting to realize how much my art is separated from my source material.  There is a particular effect I’ve experienced that makes me think I may be drawing from my own mental model just as much as from a reference.

I have no trouble drawing portraits in most circumstances.  But I have drawn a couple really bad portraits – both times I had to cancel the commission.  The difference between those commissioned portraits and my successful portraits was not the money.  I’ve sold other paintings that I loved.  The difference is that I knew the person, I had a relationship with each of them and had seen them many times.  Then, they handed me a photo reference and asked me to paint it.  Each time the picture came out rather strange.  The age seemed wrong somehow, the picture was obviously difference from the photo reference.  I couldn’t in good conscience finish the piece and take money for it.

I can do pet portraits great, I can draw human portraits beautifully from references, I can draw live portraits wonderfully as well.  I could not understand why this time, especially with money on the line, it would go so badly.

I have an idea that it may be an issue arising from my familiarity with the subject.  When I look at a picture of someone I know, I am not really seeing the photograph.  I am seeing everything I know about them.  I am seeing what I feel about them.  A lot of times it seems to me like I am seeing how they feel about themself.  These layers show up in the way I draw them, and they superimpose on the image. 

My eyes can see that it looks wrong, but I cannot figure out how to tell my hand to fix it.  Because it matches my mental model.  It caused me a lot of anguish to have to decline the commission, and has destroyed any career I could have had.

But maybe that which was keeping me from taking that particular kind of commission is the very thing that gives my art the life it has.  Once I know someone, I start drawing things that are more personal, and less representational.  Whether we like it or not.

My favorite art prompts are for abstract things, like game characters or emotions or atmosphere.  I can reach into the intention of the situation and make something truly magical.  Then the mental model always transmits beautifully.

I wonder if that’s not what Picasso was painting, when he invented cubism and started painting people interdimensionally.  Maybe if I intended to paint a representation of my friends, instead of a photograph, I might be left with something I like better.  That’s the communication of art, isn’t it, making the private internal world physical and external?

Perhaps I’ll never be able to be a commissioned portraitist, but I will always make something wholly my own.  I seem to be unable to separate my drawing from my internal world.  Whenever I give my hand free rein, it paints things I have never seen.  Oddities not even found in dreams.

Exploring the intersection between representation and communication is difficult, even in art.  People put their expectation either into realism, surrealism or abstraction with anything in the uncanny valley between assumed to be a skill issue.

I feel like my failures may be so hard to fix simply because of how true they were.  A truth deeper and more inescapable for not coming from a lack of skill.  A failure borne of my tendency to see too deep, into things that may not be there at all.