The essence of humanity lies in our ability to communicate, to share ourselves with the world through expressions and connections. From the day we were born we have learned how to read expressions on a face, our wellbeing depends on it. This communication is what unites us, it is who we are and what makes us human.
Portraiture is the study of that communication. Portraiture aims to understand how we connect with others, turns our inner truth inside out for the world to see. Portraiture, a timeless exploration of human identity, has been around since the beginning of art and has been used to show the human essence. It can be used to show oneself, to show off a status, a career, to show a loved one, or an emotion. A good portrait shows the external self as a window to reflect the inner personalities and emotions we feel. It is not only a person’s likeness but their very essence. Every generation has explored portraiture as a communication to show us who they are.
Now portraiture has evolved with the digital age, presenting unique challenges in uncharted territories. The uncanny valley is one such challenge, the digital medium has allowed us to get closer in realism than ever before, but it has proven how little we know about what makes us appear the way we do. Being slightly off realism can create an emotion of unease, it has shown us what is not human. It has also allowed us to start exploring and reevaluating our thoughts on how we define ourselves, to take a closer look at the subtleties of what makes us alive.
“The digital medium changes the way we see, unlike a painting, the digital medium can last forever.”
Even with AI, we are questioning if we can connect emotionally to a generated avatar, or do we need to have a human hand in its creation? These questions are bringing us forward to a new era, an era of understanding ourselves on a deeper level, an era of digital art. My intent with my digital portraits is to accept these new technologies and reevaluate our thoughts and hopefully discover something new about how we define ourselves.
In creating my portraits, I look back through art history and examine how portraits were made in the past. The great masters created some of the most powerful connections ever made in portraiture, they created techniques that were able to reveal a subject to us like never before. I have studied these techniques and have aimed to bring them into my own work.
By exploring and adapting some of these techniques, from the lighting, to the posing of the subjects, the composition, and the narrative they create, I have been able to create a portrait that feels more believable in a digital world.
Rembrandt’s portraits were painted hundreds of years ago yet they feel very present to this day. He is not photorealistic in his style, but he knows how to capture the essence of his subjects. His style shows hands that are painted with only a few strokes, skin that seems to have every color in it, and on closer inspection you can feel the texture of the paint.
“Rembrandt’s portraits were painted hundreds of years ago yet they feel very present to this day.”
He does not hide the imperfections, but seems to immerse himself in them, uses them to show the humanity of his craft and the soul of his subjects. In the digital age we strive so hard to create perfection, void of mistakes, but it is in those mistakes that allows us to see the human touch. It shows us its vulnerability in a powerful way and lets us connect with it.
The digital medium changes the way we see, unlike a painting, the digital medium can last forever. Pixels will never fade and we can zoom into an image almost infinitely. A portrait no longer needs to live in 2D space but now can exist in 3D and can be seen from any angle and any size. We can even have AI generate hundreds of images almost instantaneously.
“In the digital age we strive so hard to create perfection, void of mistakes, but it is in those mistakes that allows us to see the human touch.”
The digital medium is different than any previous medium before it and more powerful than any other, it has no rules or limitations. It can be so photorealistic that we cannot tell if it is real or if it was created. It has blurred the lines of reality. It is a medium that has become invisible in the final product. It is like not being able to see the canvas and brushstrokes of a painting, or the stone in a stone sculpture. We now have to question what is real and what is not.
With the advancement of technology, we must always remember not to lose track of our humanity. We need to grow with it, encourage it. Technology doesn’t dictate my path as an artist, but it opens the doors of possibilities to explore new and different connections. A computer cannot tell you my life story, my experiences, the emotions I have felt, or who I am, but it can be used as a tool to help me express those feelings in a much deeper way. I can capture a subject’s identity, personality, and likeness and express them in ways never seen before.
By bringing art and technology together we can discover new ways of learning about ourselves and can express ourselves without limitations. Some of the greatest artworks in history had the power to evoke emotions of an entire generation, now we are lucky enough to be the generation to birth the digital medium and use it to show who we are.
By creating portraits that try to capture the essence of people, the future will see that we, like every generation before us, have tried to understand who we are. The underlying question to every portrait is the question: what makes us human? What defines us as human, is the world we create.
