Description of expressive portraits.
Light spirit.
Expressive actually only means to express or that something have an expression, often used in terms of expresing emotions or inner feelings.
Therefore this can be understood as a portrait with expressions of emotions or a portrait with feeling, and yet, this is not precise.
One of the reason that I have chosen the word expressive is that it referes to the tradition of the expressionists,
they found a way to paint that parted from the naturalistic and traditionalistic way, that strive to give a realistic representation of the world.
In the work with these portraits the core element have been the emotion, rather than the similarity.
The overall idea of the expressionistic portraits have been to describe the emotion or the mood, this then have to be accurate, the similarity with the person having the emotion do not, in this context it is just not that importat.
Secound, I have been working with the structure in the paintings, the brush strokes, traces of different kinds of tools and so on.
You could say that portraits in generel contains a desription of a persons physical pressens
as well as a description of the persons expression or emotional expression or mood.
This goes for both tradition portrait paintings, to some degree or one of these expressive portraits in the other end of the scale
that gives the emotion a higher priority than the likeness.
In these portraits the emotion are often not specific to the one person in the portrait, the persons characther may however have an influence,
but it is more specific to that emotion or type of emotion.In working with these images I have also prioritised that they are painted and that this quality is clear in the final result.
What I mean is that the brush strokes can be seen or the tracks of other tools, rather than having smooth seamless surfaces.
I have been working with the smooth surface besides the strokes in order to enhance and maintain the essential in the works.
In the image above you can see one of the paintings that are a celar representation of my idea with expressive portraits.
Here by I am also saying that not all paintings, even in the cathegory, are as clearly an expressive portrait as this one,
Some painting contains other elements or are placed differently on the scale between physical likelyness and artistic emotional expression.
Greef.
This image is more traditional in it´s presentation than the previous eventhough it still is expressionistic,
since it has clear descriptions of things like hair, lips, eyelashes and clothing.
I do however hope that it is clear for the viewer that the idea was not to portrai for instacen her skin, in a naturalistic manner.
To me the purpose of the image was and still is to portrai the emotion or state of mind, and I therefore consider the image to be one of the expressive portraits.
References.
The starting point for the visual descriptions of emotions are the seven basic emotions and variations hereof.
The 7 basic emtions can have numerous variations and combinations.
You can find a description here: Emotion.
The style the images are painted in have found inspiration in the art history or tradition, among others the expressionism.
You can find a description here: The expressionism.
In the style you could talk about traces of the abstract expressionism.
You can find a description here: Abstract expressionism..