About the human being. Various Portraits #1

Hello friends, I'm back to share with you another of my works and I'll be talking about portraits as an artistic resource. Well, this is one of the themes most used by the different artists that make up the art world, so I think it's appropriate to talk a little more in depth about this topic. I had previously published a quick drawing of this same model, but today I decided to conclude this work with another drawing.

A portrait is the plastic expression or imitation of a person or animal, which usually seeks to capture the most distinctive features of the subject, his personality and even his mood.

Technique: pencil on paper

The portrait appears in the 5th century B.C. on the coins of the Persian kings. Its use expanded especially since the death of Alexander the Great. It underwent considerable development in Roman times. In the Middle Ages portraits continued to be made on coins. During the Italian Quattrocento, effigies were made on medallions as coins. The custom of effigies on medallions was inaugurated by Pisanello in 1439.

The use of the portrait is varied, first it was used as a political symbol, the rulers commissioned portraits to generate a symbol of authority before their subordinates. Religion has also made exhaustive use of this resource to capture the faces not only of the emblematic characters of each of its doctrines, but they have also been extremely useful in bringing to life the scenes told in the sacred writings of different religions.

The use of the portrait was also implemented quite broadly by royalty and the bourgeoisie, as a search to accentuate social status and perpetuate eternity through a fixed image of the model that would endure through the years to be remembered by future generations.

Today the use of portraiture is much broader and more far-reaching in terms of the people who implement it, no longer limited to royalty, politics or religion. Today anyone can portray anyone through a photograph, a drawing, a painting or a sculpture. Beyond the plastic fact, the portrait takes a psychological character in the fact that we are identifying a face, whether it is our own or someone else's. This serves us to understand more about ourselves through the subjectivity implicit in the act of observing someone else (or ourselves) directly in the face, to observe how the unconscious of the person is manifested through their gestures, their features, perfections or imperfections, is quite interesting.

a little bit of the process.

To conclude, I would like to mention that the image I used as a reference belongs to a documentary called "HUMAN's Musics", which shows a number of very well filmed portraits and part of the culture from which the models come from. This is an excellent work in my opinion, since it talks about us, our different cultures, the different we can become at the same time that we are not as different as it seems.

Here is the link to this documentary available on youtube.

Good friends this was my delivery today, I hope to continue sharing more about this and other creative topics I will be working on. Thanks for your attention!