Please Meet My Portraits
Every portrait I paint is created from life. I spend hours with my subject sharing personal time studying not only the light and shadow of their features, but their inner light.
Portraiture is more than look-a-likeness. The physical body is just one aspect of the person. The personality is as variable as one’s color or gender or stature or morality. The outward appearance is molded by invisible inner subtle qualities - their aura. Foremost, in a person’s aura is consciousness which I think of as the spark of life in them. This presence is the true subject of portraiture. The beautiful tree or landscape, the bouquet or bowl of colorful fruit, will not and cannot respond to the painted image they inspired - only a human can.
That capacity to respond is the subject that I think portraiture is principally about, and the response is not limited to the subject only but involves other humans and over centuries. However, portraiture is not only about a psychological revelation of the personality. It is and should be about the discovery they show and share about themselves, not what I wished to show about them.
Most important to me is its timelessness and its eternal message.
The following portraits in different mediums and done over a span of many years, I hope will illustrate some of these thoughts.
Karim
One of, if not the most important condition in my painting a picture is that something about the subject calls to me, makes my head turn to look at it, draws me to it. In other words, it reaches out to me rather than me deciding that I am interested in it. So when then I go to it, I’m curious to find out what has caught my interest. In this spirit of curiosity, I am open to discovery and discovery is always about something new and unknown. It is somehow like it was supposed to happen yet it takes courage to approach and ask someone to allow you to paint or draw a portrait of them. Fortunately, the call is often stronger than one’s self-doubt.
Karim was working at the Nanette & Romare Bearden Art Gallery in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten. I asked if she would allow me to paint her portrait and she agreed. I came on the appointed day and she was sorry to inform me that a tourist ship was unexpectedly in port and she would be too busy for us to work, and would I come another day. I was almost more relieved than disappointed. Portraiture is often an intimidating undertaking, but I was there and ready so I said, “Why don't we work until the people come, and then I will stop.” She stood in the doorway waiting while we talked and somehow her gaze, her gesture, her jewelry and the color of her dress and surroundings, her eyes, everything was enveloped in a timelessness. I hardly remember actually painting and we were done by the time her visitors arrived. It was as if I had been given a beautiful gift.
Gilbert Denis
In the small village of Grand Case where I grew up, you knew everyone. Certain qualities stand out as if symbolically more so than your actual knowledge or experience of them. Mr. Gilbert Denis was one of these personalities. You knew him by the ramrod uprightness in the way he walked, aloof and quiet and mysterious. I always naturally had a deep sense of respect for him, saw him as elegant and handsome and always well-groomed. I left the island for many years and when I returned, much had changed but some things not. The houses seemed smaller, my schoolmates like myself had changed and grown up, but Creole Rock was there as it had always been and Gilbert, older, was exactly as I had always remembered him - stately, elegant, quiet.
Many years again went by as I worked hard to have the courage to become the artist of my place and time. Eventually the time came when I understood that I had painted the rocks, the land, and the sea, the flowers and the trees, but now I should address the most challenging subject, my fellow men and women.
The tree does not care how you paint it, nor does the rock, or the cloud, but a person does. People are the only subject that has an opinion to express and therein is the difficulty of portraiture. That opinion is not limited to the subject only but implicates all of mankind so it took a while before I approached Gilbert.
“Mr. Dennis, I would appreciate it if you would agree if you would let me paint a picture of you with your suit on.”
“Well, that would have to be on a Sunday after mass. I only wear my suit on Sunday.”
That short exchange was like a huge accomplishment for me. I had approached this mysterious person from my childhood memory. Now I was faced with actually doing it - transmitting it onto canvas. I planned to work in the rectory behind the church, but the light was not good and there were too many people. This was a private and privileged exchange so we went to my studio gallery in Marigot. We worked on the porch, him standing with his cane and sunglasses, never saying a word until he was tired and wanted to go home. I thanked him and he looked at the painting for the first time and pointed to the gray line in his otherwise dark hair and said,
“Next time, you have to paint that white out.”
Roseann Romnit
There is no way that we can at a glance imagine the richness and complexity of the person we see on the street yet in fact that they attract your attention maybe heralds hidden treasures. This was certainly the case with Roseann Romnit.
It was carnival time, a time when I also got into a frenzy of painting the crowds, the multicolor, gyrating troops, the music making my chest and clothes and canvas throb with the blasting roadside march in the hot afternoon sun. When I met Roseann though it was a quiet afternoon. She stood on the roadside in a large broad hat, a fiery red blouse and a down-to-the-ground white embroidered skirt down to her ankles, her umbrella and the stance that made her appear to be the center of everything.
I immediately pulled my car over and called out,
“I would love to paint your portrait!”
She said, “When?”
“Thursday?”
She answers again, “What time and where?”
And so began an adventure that resulted in several charcoal portraits and a large six-foot oil painting dressed as I first saw her on the roadside.
This lady, dress to the T was headed to Town ready for rain or shine, for Jump-Up and parade, noise, smoke, food and drink, turned out as I got to know her, had returned from Holland to her native St. Martin, having been declared unable to be helped with terminal cancer. Yet here she was, several years later, cancer-free, never having been operated on or through the use of medication, only herbs and cleansing and fasting.
This lady that caused me to stop and ask a stranger to be my model was a living miracle. Cheerful and devoted now to helping others find health and happiness and for me to have the privilege to be close to a spirit like hers is a profound lesson about the mystery and richness of those around us.
Self Portrait
I have painted many self portraits throughout my 60 year career as an artist, from art school to last week, young and old, and more than one in any given year in drawings, charcoal, pencil, ink, watercolor, oil and etching. Not vanity, just looking and leaving a trace of the changes in my body, feelings and state of mind. Portraiture is a record for posterity. It is evidence of how life has molded us. It is a search to understand who we are, a way of reconciliation, a trace left of our inevitable journey until we are no more. It is perhaps, as history prompts us to think, a way to some degree of immortality. That is what I think portraiture confers and has conferred on all individuals whose portraits have survived through the centuries. We know what they looked like, dressed like and we can see and sense their characters, yet though they are gone, they are still with us.
This is not the reason for the portrait. That reason is more immediately related to live life, but is nonetheless, the result of the transmission of the likeness and spirit through an artistic medium to the future. Self portraits are also necessary if one is to do portraits of others, not only as a test of ability but of objectivity. Truth, detachment, honesty are tested in the auto portrait - the portrait of self, and self is best portrayed through objectivity, through the understanding that we are physical, emotional, intellectual, and most important of all, that we are spiritual beings. Our deepest reality is that we are not material beings only. That which exists beyond our physical lifetime is who we really are and portraiture attempts to help us understand this profound truth.
Roland passionately continues his journey of discovery in portraiture with both commissions and models. Stay tuned for more stories.
Please let us know if you would like to join his journey with him by having your or your loved one’s portrait painted.
Time and tide wait for no man…