What about “style” I wonder… (ramble?)

How does it relate to determining your voice and articulating that voice and allowing others to find it – to be recognizable. It also has me thinking about how other artists look at themselves – through the democratic machine – the camera…. More about idea and technique (or maybe craft?). What role does style play?

Self-Portrait Three Times
24.1.90 Oil on Photograph
Gerhard Richter

Suppose a painter appropriates photography – to loosely record an image of self – three times. Is it a photograph (or just a narcissistic snapshot) or a painting? What might it say ? Richter’s self-portrait is more than just a photograph – not really a snapshot – after all. It does more than merely record. What transforms it ? The image or the stuff of the image (oil paint) ? Is it pretty? What is it that makes the object interesting to me – What provokes me to think.

In Richter’s self-portrait above – I visually I go back and forth into the image (the realness represented by the photo – yet recorded three times over) and then back to the physicality of the surface and the actions of the artist recorded at yet another time of the artist’s intention – an application of tool and oils… a layered time record. I think Richter represents both idea and craft in the image and I like it for that depth. But it’s all about the artist and his struggle to justify his painting right? But the craft is sort of only represented – not really embodied in the particular portrait example.

Chuck Close b. 1940
Big Self-Portrait, 1968
acrylic on canvas
107 1/2 in. x 83 1/2 in.

Suppose an artist appropriates the photographic self portrait in a photo-realism sense -(beware ideology of “isms”) Close makes it his own I think by the fact that he painted it by hand – his hand – as opposed to the machine image – (and he does it again and again in different media over a long , long time )- but the image tries hard to be real – really real. It tries to be like a photograph record. But what is recorded here? Where do you go when you look at an image like this – where does it take you – admiration of craftsmanship – no doubt. Appreciation of artistic labor – and as I become more aware of this artists “body of work” a certain tenacity and an appreciation for change (physical aging / changes) over time. It’s old news, but I enjoyed looking again over the interview – “Navigating the Self” associated with Chuck Close’s show “Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005” – at the Walker last year… Chuck Close closes the interview with:

. . . I think if I had been one of those smooth-faced pretty boys, I would
not have done a lot of self-portraits. I don’t think it would have been very
interesting.

Davos S.