Looking Back at My Own Early Foray into Contemporary Portraiture

I’ve been thinking a lot about contemporary portraiture lately, having just given a new talk on the subject, followed by a new weekend workshop.

I’ve been drawing or painting or otherwise making portraits my entire life, and it remains an important aspect of my work.

Nowadays a lot of my portraits are photo-based, as you can see in my posts and website. I got thinking about when I first started working on photo-based and photo-digital portraits, and realized it was for my first solo show as an adult, entitled Face[t]s of Valerie, in 2007. All of the portraits were of my friend Valerie, alone or sometimes in combination with me.

This image was kind of the title piece for the show, and the deepest I explored digitally in it, (the show was multimedia, because I am nothing if not a “multi” kind of artist, lol!). It’s called The Many Facets of Valerie.

In it you can see numerous shots from the bigger shoot, allowing me to show what interested me: the living face of my subject, its variability and expressiveness. “I am large, I contain multitudes” wrote Walt Whitman, as we all are.

So it’s a seminal, developmental piece. It started a train of thought that hasn’t stopped since, though it has branched off and grown in many directions.

19"x13” digital print. And yes, it’s available.

Does this kind of post, deep-diving into an individual piece, interest you? If so, please let me know in the comments. 

The Many Facets of Valerie by Kim-Lee Kho is a photo-digital portrait that was seminal in my development. From 2007.