Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work? | Hacker News Reader

Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?

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113 pointsbenbreen40 comments

Stuff like this is hard to validate. For most renaissance artists, their self-portraits are far from photorealistic.

There is also quite a big difference between painting from nature and by construction from the mind, which I think is important here. I suppose that one learns a certain template for faces, mostly by practice. If most of that practice is on self-portraits in a mirror, then, yes, the rote characters may look like that face as well. It would take deliberate practice to have multiple templates available. Any comic book artists who'd like to chime in here?

Observing this phenomenon in contemporary artists is troublesome, because they are so much influenced by photography, not only by anatomy or live observation.

An interesting contemporary artist in this context might be Philip Akkerman [1]. He has made over 10,000 (!) self portraits, nearly half of them are paintings.

[1] https://philipakkerman.com/

"Stuff like this is hard to validate. For most renaissance artists, their self-portraits are far from photorealistic."

Author here. Agreed, it's definitely not a science.

I suspect the author of this article I link to in the post might disagree though: http://www.laboratoiredanthropologieanatomiqueetdepaleopatho.... He is making an actual claim to scientific validity, complete with tables of measurements of the distance between Benvenuto Cellini's "lateral nasal point" and pupils in various potential self-portraits. I'm skeptical, but it's interesting to note that the author seems to know what he's talking about (director of a university paleopathalogy lab and "Expert en Anthropologie d'identification" for the French legal system).

The big confound here is: are you mostly measuring things about the artist's true appearance in a self-portrait, or are you measuring things about just how he is inclined to portray a face in general (either in a self-portrait or otherwise)?

When cartooning without reference you have two general methods available:

1. Recall a contour you've committed to muscle memory, e.g. through blind contour studies.

2. Construct a form from primitive geometry, which can be memorized as a recipe like stating the figure's proportions in "heads of height" (e.g. Andrew Loomis's figure drawing books).

While you can adjust the proportions of contours in 2D by moving your hand with exaggeration, adjusting a form in perspective is a much more calculated thing, and artists tend to gravitate towards simpler, letter-like ratios in their proportions unintentionally as they make adjustments. Thus, unusual poses and perspectives tend to be distorted towards a kind of default, symbolic figure - and mapping them to the intended character needs reference to help the brain see how the proportions differ. There are tricks that can reduce the guesswork(e.g. Burne Hogarth Dynamic Figure Drawing) by starting with drawing a well-understood perspective and then making 90 degree camera moves to restate the pose in a different viewpoint. But a reference lets you get a contour immediately, and it avoids distortion, so comic artists will tend towards using reference for solving the really hard drawing problems - even if you have no technology to help, you could get a friend to make the pose and then draw the contour of that, then fix up whatever's necessary by adding some construction over that.

For similar reasons cartoonists will tend to draw the same kind of "symbolic" face - enough to indicate character and staging, but not measured like a portrait drawing. Depending on how they practiced faces, it could be their own face or an ideal construction. And if they have the visual library available, they can make new faces by combining the symbols differently. A good caricaturist can just look and get the contours and have 80% of the likeness in an instant, and then fill in the rest symbolically.

I think much of what you say appears to be covered in (indeed, the point of) the article?

Haha, I still have a long way to go to make myself clear on an internet forum.

I have thoroughly reread the article, and I think my comment has four original, albeit very minor, contributions, that are not covered in the article. Granted, the information density of my comment may be low. I also agree with the entire article, so my remarks are in line with what is said there.

Whenever you create any kind of art, be it a story, a picture, or whatever, I would argue you reveal something about yourself. I remember reading about Philippe Halsman, a photographer who did this series of portraits featuring celebrities jumping. His theory was that when his subjects were in the air they were so preoccupied that they would inadvertently let their guard down and let their true selves out. He did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe like this and afterwards when he told her his reasoning behind it she was so mortified she refused to ever work with him again

This is why I love the YouTube series Hot Ones. Nothing forces a guard to be down (and humanizes a celebrity) more than eating wings that are way too spicy :D

Many cartoonists draw themselves into their work. Bill Waterson looks like Calvin's dad. Jon Arbuckle is Jim Davis' alter ego. Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Moebius, they all draw impressions of themselves or alter egos into their work.

Here's a picture of Herge as a young man I looked up out of curiosity:

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9#/media/Fichier:Gal...

Does he resemble Tintin to you? I would say he totally does.

To expand even more broadly, many authors set their works in familiar circumstances, perhaps most legendarily John Steinbeck with Salinas and the central California coast and Stephen King's "Derry" (Bangor) Maine

He totally does! I grew up reading the comics and still consider myself a fan, thanks for teaching me something new about Tintin. Very cool.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor.”

…

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.” Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. “Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.” “Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Something I don't see mentioned, isn't our idea of beauty supposed to be heavily influenced by our immediate family? So if we're painting random beautiful people in the background, it wouldn't be surprising that they're loosely based on our family members who would have traits very similar to ours.

Further, with something like the Sofonisba Anguissola self portrait, the virgin Mary being influenced by her mother would explain everything just as well. Even the similar hairstyle could be her copying her mother rather than inserting herself as Mary.

It’s pretty common. Our faces and mannerisms are the thing we’re most familiar with.

When I worked in animation, I could tell who on the team modelled a character based on the subtle details that were reminiscent of that person. You could tell who animated a shot by the subtle details of how a character moved and acted.

Art is a reflection of self. Even art for hire or objective reproductions. Even photographs. There’s a bit of us in everything we do, whether that’s personality, mannerisms, world views or personal history.

For the coders here, you must have hit code bases where you see a function and know who on your team wrote it. It’s the same thing.

> For the coders here, you must have hit code bases where you see a function and know who on your team wrote it

Thank you for the analogy, I was thinking precisely that.

Something that would sometimes grate me is working on a project where you could "feel" that several people had contributed to it over time and had not understood the "spirit" of what previous authors were trying to achieve. Have you experienced something like that in your own work? Having the sense that what you are working on is a pastiche aggregated over time by an unwitting committee of tired workers?

Isolated temporally aggregated pastiche is a medium some artists revel to work with, unfortunately the first adjective is often missing from the metaphor, and the blind keep pushing the clay further from the points of realization upon the artists fingers.

When I worked on some of the bigger projects, I’d written some tooling that let multiple artists work together on a single shot.

It’s actually very interesting how the leads for the shot would have their style picked up by the other artists so it felt more cohesive. I assume because they communicated regularly and could see communal progression of the work.

But if a shot was originally done by one animator and then picked up by another (due to vacations, priorities etc) you could often see how the style would drift because they didn’t have the shared mindspace.

Big studios have “fix animators” who basically come in to shots after the main animator is done and do any touch up notes. But “touch up” can be quite extensive and if you know the people involved, you can see how the content drifts between two minds.

I feel pretty unfamiliar with my face even though I have tons of photos of it and see it in the mirror a lot. I just don't process it the way I do a face I need to recognize or read emotions on. Of the faces I'm familiar with, I'd say it's the one I'm least familiar with.

I know I'm always coding myself into my programs.

Ah, when you reached for immortality you selected "digital horcruxes of your personality scattered all across tech".

I know a painter who consciously paints himself in all his paintings even if as a viewer you don't notice it much, he basically snips features from himself and projects them onto other subjects in his paintings, whether they are men or women. But this question is perhaps too generalized, some painters do so while others don't. Plus that subconscious part, we're never going to find out.

As a hobby painter, I believe there’s also your (in)ability or your “favorite” style of painting things that makes paintings look the same. Many of my portraits have the same style because I know or can paint certain things/angles/shadows more “right” than other. It doesn’t look like me, but I do lend my own face to find the right thing/angle/shadow.

To directly answer the question: absolutely yes, though it is not a popular theory nowadays. Whether this is an act of the subconscious, unconscious or is hard to know, but certainly it can frequently manifest unintentionally.

From my experience as an art teacher of many years:

- The student with only one arm who painted figures with only one arm. She did not realize she was doing this and was amazed when it was pointed out.

- The student with only one eye who painted wide panoramas. He had absolutely no interest in landscape as a genre, but it all came together for him when he understood his paintings as devices for evoking the binocular vision he had lost.

- The obsessive rugby player who painted groups of men arranged in scrum form. Even their heads looked like rugby balls.

The worst thing that can happen for an artist is that this process can become intentional. A good example of this is the paintings of the Surrealist painter Max Ernst whose obsession with painting birds was self-attributed to his sister being born at the same time as his pet bird dying. His paintings can be difficult to enjoy without knowing this mythology.

TFA mentions how a painters depiction of faces tend to be similar to their own face. Certainly true.

To me it seems simpler to suppose the artist is drawing everyone (including themselves) in the same distorted way, as opposed to imposing themselves into everyone.

Ideally you'd have a photo of the artist for comparison, instead of a self portrait. That'd remove this ambiguity. Admittedly that's a bit challenging for renaissance artists, but it'd be easy for modern artists.

Sometimes they painted themselves into their work consciously and in revenge.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jul/11/durer-p...

Reaction: Nope! - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/95/Warhol-...

  > I never let anybody look until it's finished.

  > Does it look like me?

  > It's not supposed to.

  > It's not?

  > Of course not.

  > Didn't anybody ever tell you

  > That the true artist

  > Only ever depicts himself?

  - Stealing Beauty (1996)

Not always subconsciously. Saw this today:

> Dürer painted himself at centre of Renaissance altarpiece in revenge, research finds

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jul/11/durer-p...

I would be surprised if they _didn't_ paint themselves into their work.

Example: Van Gogh _must have_ transferred his neuroses into his work. Without question.

Wow... currently in Amsterdam, was just at the Van Gogh Museum a few hours ago. The article seems to be focusing on their own facial features being applied to other subjects in their works, and by doing so giving their own visage some sort of immortality.

Of course impressionistic art is going to filter reality by the internal state of the painter. That's sorta what it is by its very definition.

More than just painting. It's no coincidence that characters in Lord of the Rings are styled like Peter Jackson.

Which ones? Except the one that is Peter Jackson in Brie.

Man it just got exciting when he proposed guessing an artist's face from their corpus.

Shame it had to end.

Oh, pointers subconsciously point themselves every which way in my work.

Re:

> An AI-related proposal

When Stable Diffusion came out, one of the first things I did was prompt it to generate some self portraits:

https://imgur.com/a/GhlUnPn

"Self portrait" is just another category of image to Stable Diffusion. It's not rendering what it thinks Stable Diffusion looks like, it's rendering what it thinks a typical self portrait looks like.

I was thinking along the same lines, but it would have to be not only a self portrait but also the reflection of the key elements of that self portrait into its other creations.

Why, are you worried your Creative-diffusion-LLM-thing will start leaking your bitcoin wallet private keys over time?

Don’t be ridiculous. But Stable Diffusion could start hallucinating PII.

Not stable diffusion, but it already can...

> The person behind the Hacker News username "NikkiA" is a software developer named Nikhil Arora. He has worked at several tech companies, including Google and Dropbox, where he developed tools for web development and machine learning. In addition to his work as a developer, Nikhil also enjoys sharing his knowledge with others through his Hacker News posts on topics such as programming languages, software engineering best practices, and the future of artificial intelligence.

Not one aspect of that, including the gender, is right.

Well, OK, I was a software developer at one point, but really.

There appear to be several people with that real name, but none of them seem to have worked at dropbox, so I imagine it's 100% hallucinated.

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