The Portrait Artist

I am an artist, and my artwork looks like me.

From the upcoming book “Treasures of Grace - The Gift of Peace for Troubled Times” by Kira Marie McCullough and Keb Burns. Published by Wordcraft Press. Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in October 2024

I am an artist, and my artwork looks like me.

I was a teenager when I began to sell my work at local art shows. The shows were fun, and I was always thrilled when a customer liked my work enough to actually pay money for it. It gave me a great deal of joy to paint it and made me happy when someone else found joy in it, too.

However, one thing puzzled me. Often, someone would look at the figures in my paintings and say, “They look like you.” How could that be? They clearly weren’t me; they were just figures from my imagination or portraits of other people. I mentioned this to my parents, who were also artists and my first art teachers. At the dinner table one evening I asked, “Why do people say my paintings look like me?” My father glanced at my mother with a knowing smile.

“Because they do look like you,” my mother answered.

She explained that it’s a common trait of artists to unconsciously paint themselves into their portraits. They also put their personalities into other kinds of art as well: landscape, still-life, sculpture, even abstract. That bothered me. A portrait should look like the subject, not the artist.

“This must be a characteristic of amateurs,” I said, with a touch of disdain.

My mother shrugged. “I don’t think we can help it,” she replied.

I wasn’t convinced. “Real” artists don’t do that, I was sure! I concluded that I needed to study art under an experienced professional to get rid of this bad habit.  

At an art show one weekend, I discovered two outstanding portrait artists with many years of experience and excellent reputations in portraiture. Both of these women taught classes and I decided to choose one and ask if I might be allowed to become a student. But which one? Each had a slightly different style.

Wandering back and forth between their booths, I saw that each artist had made portraits of famous people to show that they could paint an accurate likeness. Both had done portraits of the actor John Wayne, and both likenesses were excellent. And yet they were different. The John Wayne in the first booth looked down on the crowd with a kindly twinkle in his eye. The John Wayne in the second sneered at us with a steely-eyed stare. Both were clearly John Wayne, just John Wayne with two different personalities. Then I noticed that all the portraits in the first booth had soft, smiling, gentle expressions and all the portraits in the second had hard, cynical faces.

I decided to interview each artist to see which would be the better teacher. The first artist was a kindly, gentle woman who talked about her love of art. She told me about her wonderful husband, her angelic grandchildren, her love for the Lord, and how she enjoyed playing the organ at church on Sunday.

The second artist spent most of our interview talking about her rat of an ex-husband and how he cheated on her, cheated her out of all her money in the divorce, and turned her ungrateful adult children against her. She went on to complain about dishonest gallery owners (who cheated her), the organizers of the art show (who cheated her), and stupid, rude customers (who cheated her). I looked up at her portraits, hanging all around me. The faces glared down at me as if they thought I was going to cheat her, too.

I suddenly realized that I was witnessing the phenomenon my mother was talking about. These two artists painted excellent, accurate likenesses of their subjects but they somehow painted their own feelings and personalities into the images. These were not the right teachers for me.

Since neither of these two artists could teach me how to avoid this fault, I thought perhaps I could learn better from the great masters. I decided to go to the library (no internet in those days) and check out every book on every famous portrait artist I could find. Perhaps by studying their works I could learn how to overcome this flaw. The revelation came with the first books I took home. On page after page, the paintings all reflected in some way the life of the artist. The coffee table edition of the collected works of Rembrandt struck me the most.

Rembrandt painted a vast collection of works over his lifetime: historical and mythological scenes, allegories, Biblical characters, portraits of civic leaders, and more. The truth hit me as I saw Rembrandt’s soft, doe-like eyes looking out from every face, whether it was his own self-portrait, the Head of Christ, or the father of the Prodigal Son. Even the faces of animals! His sketch of a resting lion has the same eyes and expression as his self-portraits.

That’s when I began to understand this phenomenon. It’s not a flaw. We don’t put ourselves into our work because we are amateurs; we put ourselves into our work because we are artists. The expression of self is the essence of the creative instinct. Creation is the visible manifestation of the invisible “me.” Manifesting our thoughts and feelings is our raison d’etre. While we can sometimes suppress the trait by following a disciplined formula, such as in commercial or technical art, we can’t hide it when we are creating something for the pure joy of creating.

When you look at a work of art in a museum, you are looking at a material object that was once an immaterial thought in someone’s mind. This is quite an extraordinary thing, when you think about it, that we can take invisible thoughts and feelings and create a physical object that radiates those same thoughts and feelings to the viewer.

I found this fascinating. How do we do this? How do we glop our feelings and personalities onto a paintbrush and spread our souls all over a piece of stretched linen cloth? I am many decades older now and I still don’t know how we do it.

The ancient Greeks were likewise fascinated by this phenomenon of how thought and feeling can be turned into physical matter. They gave this phenomenon a name. They called it “logos”, a force of creative thought so strong, it could manifest visibly as a physical thing.

The Apostle John brilliantly used this logos concept to introduce Christ into Greek culture. In the first lines of his Gospel, John explained that the creative thought behind the existence of all things was not an impersonal cosmic force but a Divine Person, the Second Person of the Trinity. “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…”

Unfortunately, there is no exact translation in English for the word Logos. It has traditionally been translated into English as “word,” but this is far short of its rich meaning. Whenever I read the first Chapter of John, I like to read it this way:

“In the beginning was the Divine Intellect, and the Divine Intellect was with God and the Divine Intellect was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be…and the Divine Intellect became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Here, John tells us that the logos, the creative force of the Divine Intellect, is so powerful, not only did it turn God’s invisible thoughts into material things like stars and trees and rocks and animals and water and people, the Divine Intellect Himself manifested as a visible, touchable, material man.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.” Col 1:15-17

So what does this have to do with the subject of peace?

Because we are made in his image, we have his characteristics. Just like God, we too impart our thoughts, feelings and personalities into what we create. And here is where this phenomenon gets a little scary. Human beings create more than just paintings and pottery. We create families, homes, workplaces, schools, communities and cities. We create tools and factories and machines and computers and software. We create books and magazines and websites and movies and music. Everything we create is a visible manifestation of what is going on inside of us. We can’t help it; it’s in our nature.

As I begin this 30-day devotional to find peace, I begin with an examination of conscience to look at what my past choices have created so far. I can get a picture of the current state of my soul by looking around me. Do I like what I see? What have I created so far on my piece of canvas, that part of my life that is under my control? Is my home in chaos or in order? Within my family, have I created peace or war? Is my neighborhood, workplace, classroom a more beautiful place when I am there?  Is my life a masterpiece in the making?

I create, and my creations look like me. But if I allow God to fill my soul completely, my creations will look like him.