Two Faced portraiture

‘A face is like a good guidebook to a city we are unfamiliar with: it doesn’t tell us everything, yet it tells us most of what we need to know’.  Quote by Adrian Shaughnessy whilst pondering how reliable our faces are in illustrating our personality and our moods.  It is the role of the portrait artist to scruntinise a face, pick up on those traits within, and transform them into a portrait imbued with likeness in the physical sense but also reflective of the personality of the subject.

“The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things” Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I received Two Faced as a birthday gift last year, and it has since become one of my favourite books to flick through for creative inspiration.  Produced by Darren Firth of WIWP, it is a colourful collection of work by different influential and professional image-makers, split into two sections.  The first is a celebration of 21^st century portraiture, showcasing a varied selection of portraits produced by different methods through many different creative mediums – from felt pen on paper to badges arranged on a board.  The second section contains series of portraits produced by pairs of artists coupled by Firth to create representations of one another.  The result is over 100 portraits found exclusively in this book and transforms Two Faced from merely a collection of portraiture to more of an art project in itself.  For me this pairing up of the artists is quite an interesting concept, the interaction between the two, producing work that is representative and revealing of characteristics belonging to both the subject and the artist, and then vice versa.  The book has quite a free and experimental feel to it, including interviews, quotes and biographies amongst the hundreds of illustrations.             

“A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter, one must paint its atmosphere” Umberto Boccioni

Overall an inspiring book that showcases colourful and exciting work created from an extremely wide variety of styles and therefore producing fascinating and contrasting outcomes – all originating from the same starting point, that of the face.  Work included by artists such as David Shrigley, McFaul, Stella Vine, Paul Willoughby, Marion Deuchars, Jonathon Ellery and many more.