Comparing galleries for MA Professional Practice module

Choosing galleries for this comparative study has been a real trial. The idea to take to galleries and compare them, is simple enough but to have 3000 words to say about the differences seems almost impossible. That they should be similar types of institutions both public or both private and of comparable scale seems initially counter intuitive but after consideration is actually fairly obvious; if the are similar the differences are less obvious and therefore have to be explained. Although actually the public / private distinction could actually be played with, say comparing a privately owned gallery with pretensions to philanthropy to a public gallery which now has to have commercial concerns in the modern world, for example the Saatchi gallery with the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

My eventual choice has been to choose two private galleries, of relatively medium scale not so big that they were amorphous multinational machines but not so small that if I blinked they might go to the wall in the current economic climate. One of the most significant factors in the choice was that as I would like to make some form of living from my art practice, while there might be more to be said about the very large galleries such as White Cube it would be personally advantageous to investigate the workings of galleries in which I could visualise my own work being shown in.

The context of my work - How instrumental is it?

For my MA studio proposal, I intended to and still might produce a potted history of portraiture to give context to the work I intend to make this summer counter intuitive to make a meaningful proposal particularly in art, or at least the form of art I make. However in many ways it has no bearing on my work and the reasons I make it, I am aware of the history of the various genre's I work in, the portraiture, life drawings and paintings on canvas, the sketch book drawings, the landscapes I make when on holiday, but they are not an active reaction to the history. I am conscious of history, my skills, techniques and subjects build on methods and history but the true reason I make the work is because I want to. I draw things from life as a semi meditative process, because I like to, I have drawn since I was about seven, partly as a way to analyse the world  and partly because it was something I could be good at.

Why do I paint portraits?

My own art is not limited purely to portraiture, I have painted and drawn landscapes, cityscapes, still life, as well as dipping into sculpture and video, but portraits dominate my work and I have always returned to drawing and painting them. My version of portraiture is limited really to work directly from life and not from photography, but I can't really deny that there has been some great painting with photography as a starting point and where photography was used as a major reference, but when I have tried  to work from photographs, I find it difficult to know know when to stop and the resultant work can lose its life.

Given that, it is not really surprising that I don't really get hyper-realist paintings from photographs, the sort that dominate the BP portrait award at the National Portrait Gallery.  I understand the theory but I don't agree with it, They can only ever be as good as the photograph, for me they really show up how the photograph has super-ceded painting as representation and make the act of painting look like pointless nostalgia .  The portrait painting from the photograph is similar to the huge number of copies of paintings made to disseminate the likeness of Elizabeth I. The serve a purpose where a sitting would be infeasible, but they are always a painting of a photograph of a person rather than a painting of a person.

The next question is "what is wrong with that?"

What has Portraiture ever done for us?

If I'm going to try to put my work in context I should really start with the simple but big question of  "What is the purpose of portraiture?" Whether painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, videoed or any possible medium why make a "likeness" of a person. The concept of what is a likeness itself can be questioned, but if we start simply with the question "why, pre-photography would someone make a drawing or painting of a person?" It is probably to record what they look like.

Why would you want to record what someone looks like? At a very basic level it is representation, to show them and others what they look like and to have their presence when they are not there, as a reminder or memento.  This simple idea of representation, is then complicated by the relationship between subject and portrayer, whether the portrait is commissioned or the subject is paid or whether there is a more complex social relationship occurring.

This intention of the portrait is hidden behind the ostensible purpose of representation, whether it is a dramatic swagger portrait of a monarch such as Ingre's Napoleon I on the Throne or Gainsborough's Mrs Sheriden in a romantic rural idyll. Whatever the setting or scale there is always the supposed purpose of showing what the sitter actually looked like.

Photography took over the job of documentary representation from painting, drawing  and the like. They lost this purpose that had given this surreptitious opportunity to imbue subjects with subliminal qualities. The painted portrait became obsolete and liberated at the same time.

Some sort of proposal for my work for my MA

I have long felt that the type of portraiture,  I do, that is directly from life, is a dying and neglected art, yet here I am doing it, because it feels right for me. It feels very relevant to me and to the world around me,  so I feel I need to  investigate, the historical context of it and whether it really is neglected and what relevance does it have to contemporary life and art.

After a long discussion with my wife (argument) I began to wonder if there is actually any grounding in my theory that my type of work is undervalued or is it just me being jealous and wallowing in self pity . Maybe it is just a way of making excuses for my lack of success in selling or at getting gallery interest.

I figured out during said discussion that I need to establish in my head and in writing some parameters and rather than move the goal posts to fit my prejudices and pre-determined answers try to establish a context for my work based on fact and maybe even the opinion of others.