Taken Captive

Portraits are not easy to paint. In case any of you want to take up portrait painting, I would recommend you first take a course in anger management. The difference between a picture that looks like the intended sweet daughter in law, or one that looks like a vampire is a small extra stroke of white. With one shaky misplaced stroke of gray I made my victim lose a tooth. The dogs gathered as dinner time came and went, and I kept painting, painting, painting. Finally Honeybun could stand it no more and came over and gently pried the paintbrush from my hand with her teeth.
"Feed the dogs. We are real. That painting is not."

And she is half right. The painting is not real, but the love that motivates it is. I am doing a wedding portrait of my son Matthias and his future bride, Karissa. The bonus for me is I get to see the dress before anyone else. It is stunning. That's all I am going to say about it. They asked for a background of particular significance to them, and sent me the specifics of the wedding adornment. I have peppered them with questions that from any other mother would just be nosy: what jewelry will you wear, what will you do with your hair, what color eye shadow, what will your flowers look like....etc.   I bet if I phrased it carefully, I could find out all kinds of juicy gossip in the guise of needing background information for the psychological aspect of any great piece of art.

But I have been painting very carefully and very slowly. On one tree, near the happy couple, I actually painted in every leaf. This is highly unlike my normal expressionistic treatment of trees where a quick blob of various shades of green convey a tree with none of the anguish of detail.  Truth be told, I hate detail. Detail is hard, laborious, and exposes weakness. My whole soul races to finish in one broad stroke.... but the task at hand demands careful attention and detail, or a mouth that once was full of sparkling teeth becomes a pit of rotted, broken, gaps.

I was really ok til I hit the face. Karissa is a beautiful girl, and every viewer of the portrait will notice if I fall short of the mark. So I am using a brush where a single long hair picks up the paint, and painting micrometer by micrometer to build a face that if not exactly like hers, at least one she would want to claim.  And it is painfully obvious that if a face is not painted with exactly the correct proportion between the parts, and exactly the correct shadows to depict exactly the correct bone structure in exactly the correct space.... it ends up looking nothing like the model.

I have read that some if not most portrait artists cheat. They use a projector to flash the photo on the canvas and then copy. I don't get the point of that. Just take a photograph and be done with it. A painting, if it is a good painting is meant to capture more than just a likeness. It is supposed to capture a soul. That will be my excuse. It may not look like them on the outside but it is perfect on the inside.

As we were driving home from the mountains yesterday, Alex who has an artist's soul exclaimed, "Oh! Look at those blue mountains! I wish I had brought my camera.!"
"You should bring it the next time we go," I offered.
"I would.... but I am not sure I could get a good picture through the dog slime on the windows."
Out of the mouth of babes....
"I'll try to clean them before we go next time," I said.
"I love taking photos of landscapes.... or animals... or trees. Not people though. I never photograph people."
"Why not?" asked Asherel.
"Because I have heard when you take their picture you capture their soul."

Funny, I think of that as a good thing. That is exactly what I am trying to do when I paint. In my opinion, it is almost impossible to capture a soul. The only one who can really do that is God and it requires our permission. In fact, one of those pesky verses that I can never live out as fully as I would like to touches on this subject. We are to make "every thought captive to...Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:5)

Every thought?

I am lucky at times to get one thought out that I think God might want to hold near. Talk about being into detail! God doesn't seem to care if the vast bulk of my thoughts are in line with His desires. He uses the very tiniest brush available. He wants every thought....every little one. hoo boy.

And if He is sending me a message through the agonizing symbol of my painting, struggling molecule by molecule to paint a likeness and spirit of a beloved and familiar face.... then I suspect that I won't look anything like the image God desires to paint of me til every single itty bitty thought is captive to Him.

This painting is going to take a very long, long time.

Isaiah 49:8-10

 ⁸ This is what the LORD says:    “In the time of my favor I will answer you,
   and in the day of salvation I will help you;
I will keep you and will make you
   to be a covenant for the people,
to restore the land
   and to reassign its desolate inheritances,
⁹ to say to the captives, ‘Come out,’
   and to those in darkness, ‘Be free!’
   “They will feed beside the roads
   and find pasture on every barren hill.
¹⁰ They will neither hunger nor thirst,
   nor will the desert heat or the sun beat down on them.
He who has compassion on them will guide them
   and lead them beside springs of water.