PORTRAITOLOGY

The Portraitology oil portraits celebrate the beauty of iconic women of color like Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Tyra Banks and Beyonce Knowles. The realistic paintings are embedded with photographic collages transferred frm the Internet. I label these pieces as Portraitology because they are both contemporary portraits and studies of portraiture from antiquity.

In this series, I am using portraiture to examine social issues and the relationship between life and time. Most portraits give the viewer a single moment in time; Portraitology documents a photographic montage of a person’s public life.

The process starts with collecting multiple images of a subject from Internet search engines. I then prepare all of the images for printing and quickly transfer each picture individually to the background. Although I have an intuitive idea of placement, the transfer is extemporaneous allowing for beautiful accidents.  After the background is established, I apply glazes of iridescent acrylic gold or bronze paint that drip across the entire surface. The traditional oil painting of the main portrait is a much slower process as it takes at least one to three months to to paint. Again, I use an image from a search engine to reinterpret, this time using thin layers of oils.

The use of warm sepia glazes references old master “brown paintings” in conventional museums. Those paintings of wealthy and powerful patrons were/are used to represent Western power, however, I use the brown skin of contemporary icons to contrast original ideals of superiority and fame. Also, in sifting through hundreds of pictures, I came to discover the three-quarter facial view, which was used in traditional European portrait painting, is still prevalent in mainstream media.  Many of the Portraitology pictures use that same universal pose.

Portraitology uses multiple concepts and contradicting techniques as tools of self-expression. The result is a combination of loose and spontaneous application and an exact labor-intensive process. There is also juxtaposition between the roles of gender and race, sensuality and spirituality, media information and artistic representation, celebrity and wealth and the correlation between traditional and contemporary art. Most importantly, though, I am hoping Portraitology will trigger the viewer to investigate and appreciate the prevailing universal power of the human face. 

Kip Omolade, June 25, 2010