by Wes Jamison

Portraiture used to be mimetic, representative of the actual human stuff sitting before the painter. The belief was that a person’s essence, their subject, the spirit correlated directly to the uniqueness of their face. We believed in physiognomy and phrenology: Chaucer’s Summoner’s narrow eyes, black scabby brows, and whelks of knobby white or Whitman’s animal will and large philoprogenetiveness and size. Continue reading “Violent, Dark Revolts of Being” →