My daughter sat for me for two hours and I only fixed the drawing after she left

She is fourteen, and she agreed to sit on the condition that I not make her look "weird." Which is a difficult promise for a painter, because what I want from a face is exactly the thing people call weird. The asymmetry, the way her chin goes slightly left when she is bored.

Two hours, north light, the good linen I had been saving since March. And I held back. I did not correct anything in front of her, only drew what I saw, and when she finally stood up and went to the kitchen I spent forty minutes shifting the whole right side of the face about two millimetres.

She has not seen it yet. It is better now and I am not sure I will tell her that part.

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Ramesh Jha·2w

This made me smile, ji. Two hours from a fourteen year old is no small blessing, and you were wise to keep your promise while she was there. The correction after she left I also understand fully. Sometimes the truth of a face is in the small tilt, and we cannot explain this to the person sitting before us. In our Mithila work also, the line must go where it must go, even if the sitter does not agree. She will see it when she is ready. Pray the work goes well.

Mateo Serrano·2w

"the line must go where it must go" is the truest thing in this thread. i build faces in clay and i have this fight constantly, the sitter wants symmetry and a face with perfect symmetry looks dead. i've learned to just not let them watch me work the last bit. no bad intention, it's just that the mouth corner that droops a little when they're tired is the whole person and you can't say that out loud without them hearing "i'm drawing you tired".

good luck with the firing. clay forgives nothing, so i'm guessing paint is gentler, but the two millimetres is never negotiable in any material.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

The tired mouth corner, yes. That is the thing they hear and you cannot explain it in the moment. I have done the same trick, waiting until they leave the room. It is not deception, it is just that nobody can hold still while being corrected.

On the material: paint is gentler in that you can scrape back and glaze over, so you can be wrong twice. But clay is more honest. You put the droop of the mouth in and it lives there, no hiding it under a layer. I have a lot of respect for that. Firing must be terrifying. Everything you decided, cooked permanent.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

Ji, thank you. "The line must go where it must go" is exactly it, and I am glad someone from a completely different tradition says the same thing. Two hours is a lot to ask of a fourteen year old and she gave them, so the least I owed her was to keep my hands still while she was watching. What I did after is between me and the drawing.

She saw it this morning. Stood there a long time, then said it looked like her. I did not tell her about the two millimetres. Some things you keep.

Giulia Bruno·2w

The two millimetres after she left is the whole thing. You kept the promise and you kept the drawing, both, just not at the same time.

I work in print, so the drawing is only ever a matrix for me, but the thing I keep circling back to is how much of a portrait is actually a negotiation between what is there and what we are allowed to say about it. You had a constraint and it was not even aesthetic, it was a person standing in front of you saying don't. And you didn't. Then you did, quietly, to the ghost of her.

I don't know if she will notice the shift when she sees it. I suspect not, and I suspect that's the point.

Margaret Hsu·2w

The ghost of her is the part I would push back on slightly. She was in the room for the drawing and out of it for the correction, so what you are describing is not really a portrait of her at all, or not only. It is a portrait of the forty minutes you spent alone with your own standard. I think that is the more interesting object, honestly. The printmaker's version of this is the moment you pull the first proof and see that the plate did exactly what you told it to, which is not the same as what you meant. The matrix never flatters you. Neither does a fourteen year old.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

You are right and it stings a little, which is how I know. The forty minutes alone with the drawing is a portrait of me and my standard, c'est ça. But I would say the two things are not separable. The correction exists only because of her face. I did not invent those two millimetres, I found them in what she gave me and then I argued with it in private. So it is her, filtered through my nerve.

The plate comparison is a good one, though I think the difference is that a plate cannot forgive you. She came back in and looked at it and said "oh, that's actually me," which the matrix will never say. That is the whole reason I wait until they leave the room.

Camille LaurentOP·2w

"To the ghost of her." I will be thinking about that for a while, thank you.

The print part is interesting to me, because the matrix idea cuts both ways. You make one plate and then you are done with it, but you also know it will go on printing without you, unchanged, forever. With oil I get to keep going back in. Sometimes that is a curse. I have ruined things that were finished.

But yes, the constraint was not aesthetic, that is exactly it. If it had only been my eye I would have moved the chin in front of her and she would have hated me quietly for a week. What she gave me was two hours of not moving, which at fourteen is not nothing. I owed her the stillness back.

And you are right, she probably will not see it. That is almost the point of it. She will look at the painting and see herself, and I will know where the two millimetres are, and that is the whole private arrangement. c'est ça.