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Carol Kino Observes Gwen Hardie
Soon after I met Gwen at the Yaddo artists' colony
last summer, she persuaded me to sit for my portrait--a three-hour process
that had a surprising
result. Even though Gwen had chosen to paint only a tiny portion
of my face--the rectangle bounded by my eyes and mouth--she had rendered
an amazing likeness. Her painted version of me, I felt, looked
even more like me than I do myself.
This turned out to be the first of many portraits Gwen painted that
summer. Before
long, it was easy to spot the glint in her eye and the focused attention that
usually preceded her invitation to pose. Almost every day, I visited
her studio to see what had happened within its confines. Gradually, a
community of our friends, brought to life with the most minimal aspects of
their features, began to populate her walls.
On the days Gwen wasn't painting us, she continued working on a much longer-running
project: self-portraits that investigate details of her own face, blown up
to a relatively monumental size. Whereas the small portraits use a sliver
of a person to distill a singular likeness, here the artist seems to be using
her more intimate knowledge of her own features to summon up a larger, more
universal world.
These paintings generally begin with a single element--a blue eye, the tip
of the nose, the crevasse above the upper lip. The artist paints them
while leaning over to gaze at herself in the mirror. The shapes' boundaries
can be precise or blurry, and the textures, porous or silky--it all depends
on where the light falls and how she chooses to focus her gaze.
Sometimes, the feature is easy to recognize; other times it can suggest a portion
of the body; often, its identity becomes so abstracted that one's attention
turns to the paint and brushstrokes themselves. These "self"-less
self-portraits seem to mirror the dissolving boundaries we seek when we reach
for others, and maybe even the limitless realms we sense within ourselves.
Carol Kino is a contributing editor at Art & Auction and her writing on
art often appears in the New York Times. She has also written frequently
for Art in America, Bloomberg News, Town & Country, and others, and is
now at work on the career monograph of British artist Bridget Riley.
"Face-Carol, 07.29.05", 10 x 8 inches
(Catalog "Gwen Hardie Face Paintings 2005" page 7)