The Arts: Being chosen by an artist as the subject of a painting can be a challenge to the sitter's self-image, as Sara Keatingdiscovered when she was picked out of the crowd by Katherine Boucher Beug
“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old!
. . . I would give my soul for that!”
– The Picture of Dorian Gray,
by Oscar Wilde
WHAT IS THE difference between who we are and what others perceive us to be? It is a question we first ask of ourselves when we are only infants. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called it “the mirror stage” – the point at which we are confronted with our own self-image, he wrote, awakens us to the reality of our place in the world. It is a question that was forced upon me again recently when I was approached by artist Katherine Boucher Beug, who asked if she could draw me.
It was exactly a year ago that we met, and I had been sitting alone at a public interview with film-maker Neil Jordan, being held as part of Kinsale Arts Week. I did not know that I was being observed, so I have no idea what it was she saw in my face during that hour. I can only imagine that I was gurning and grimacing in disbelief as the interviewer, Aidan Higgins, and the interviewee shocked the audience with their discomfort and their inappropriate responses to each other.
When Katherine sought me out the next day at a theatre performance, she introduced herself as a local artist and asked me whether I would sit for her. My initial response was an embarrassed but fairly definite no – the thought of watching a stranger’s impression of me emerge on paper was enough to make me cringe. I was far too self-conscious to have the stability of my sense of self – not to mention my vanity – challenged by someone else’s vision. As an arts journalist I was cautious too, aware of my own highly critical approach to painting – could anyone bear to be rendered by an artist whose work they didn’t admire?
HOWEVER, FROM Aprofessional perspective, I was also curious. Was it not part of my job to understand the process as well as the product of art, inspiration as well as image? My curiosity inevitably led me to a Google search, and what I found surprised me. Katherine Boucher Beug was a real artist, with international exhibitions and commissions under her belt, and her work was – to my eye, anyway – both beautiful and complex. The most surprising thing I discovered, however, was that her work was not figurative at all. And it was certainly not portraiture. Bold stripes sliced abstracted canvases open, and – in my favourite pieces – miniature dresses made with a variety of tulles and tweeds danced across landscapes of colour. Traditional portraiture seemed as far removed from her work as anything I've ever seen. What, I wondered, might an imagination like that make from a fairly unremarkable-looking me?
Despite western society’s obsession with the physical, most people are fairly non-committal about their appearance. Living in our bodies day in, day out, we get used to the way we look – after all, we can’t do very much about it (unless, of course, you consider extreme surgical measures). When I look in the mirror, well, there I am: a little bit older each day, but the same person nonetheless.
However, Katherine’s request had me looking at my reflection as if for the first time: at my skin, which varies in colour from yellow to sallow, depending on the season; at my aquiline nose; at the different varieties of my many freckles; at the pretty serious circles under my eyes, which swell when I am tired in the morning; at eyes which look green in some light, brown in another, but were never anything as lovely as hazel. So, no classical beauty then, but being as objective as I could about myself, I thought it was a face that you might say has character.
Was that what Katherine thought when she saw me pulling faces at the public interview? When asked, she couldn’t explain it herself. “I just see a face,” she said. “And I have this impulse. I think, that’s it, that’s what I’d like to draw.”
Whatever it was that Katherine saw when she watched me unnoticed, however, was not what she got when we drove out to her atmospheric studio in Dunderrow, Co Cork, for the sitting. As someone who can barely stand having a photograph taken, being looked at and sketched for an hour and a half was pure torture. I was uneasy, restless, and much too aware of myself to relax. Lacan, observing infants again, noticed how utterly transformed we are when we know we are being watched; it’s the fundamental condition of human consciousness, he said. I was experiencing that awakening all over again.
What was it she sought when she painted someone, I asked Katherine a few weeks ago when I went out to have a look at the portrait.
“It’s not likeness,” she confirmed. “It’s not representational. To be honest, I’m not sure what it is. Anyway, now that I look at you beside it, I think it’s all wrong. Or maybe you’ve changed.”
SHE TURNED THEpicture around to face me. It was larger than I remembered and still unfinished, lightly sketched with chalk directly on to a canvas. The board was painted a particular shade of purplish-red that I wear a lot – my favourite colour – but which I had not been wearing on the day that Katherine had drawn me. Lines of blue around the eyes drew attention to a darkness or heaviness in the spirit of the sitter. A long face made the expression look a little sad. It was recognisably me, and yet it was not how I saw myself, or even how I remember feeling that day. I remember being so nervous, as if I was an actor being called on to perform in public when I hadn't learned my lines or even "found" my character yet. And yet the picture looked like I had been caught in a private moment of contemplation so deep that I had actually been taken out of myself. Maybe that's what happens when we are so self-conscious: we don't act out but retreat into ourselves.
It is not an especially flattering picture, but I like it. More than capturing me, it seems to have captured the moment of enforced intimacy that Katherine and I shared. It is an intimate view of how she sees the world, and how I hovered uneasily in her world on that day. Looking at it, I felt I understood better the genesis of her artistic inspiration; the relationship between process and product. I also understand myself a bit better, having been challenged to open myself to the scrutiny of an artist’s wild imagination.
Katherine confesses that she hasn’t touched the picture since the day I sat for her, and I am not surprised. I have looked at her work quite often on her website over the past year – still intrigued by those stripes of hers, still wistful for those sad dresses, skipping away without bodies to wear them – and I can’t imagine a straightforward portrait hanging there among them. However, when I go in to see her latest exhibition of new work, hanging at a local gallery nearby as part of Kinsale Arts Week, I am astonished to see a series of disembodied heads floating on canvases, their faces obliterated; anonymous and yet still so very human; expressionless and yet so full of emotion.
My portrait may not be hanging among them, but it pleases me a little to know that I may be in there somewhere; if not in form, then maybe in just a little bit of my spirit.
