Portraits not just a moment in time

By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, November 13, 2009

Portraits slow you down.

That, at least, is the thesis of the National Portrait Gallery's "Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009." Not that the artworks on view were chosen for their adherence to that theme. The show is, after all, a contest. The 49 finalists were selected for inclusion on merit only, by a panel of jurors from inside and outside the museum. The show includes photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and collage. Most of the works are hyper-realistic, though one is near abstract. Another, by Leor Grady (see sidebar), is entirely conceptual. Nevertheless, the theme is there, and not just because the wall text tells you. You can feel the ticking of the clock in the art itself.

Several pieces openly address the subject of mortality: Stanley Rayfield's painting "Dad," which pulls aside the shirt of the artist's diabetic father to reveal the subject's scar from open-heart surgery. Or Erika Larsen's photograph "Deerslayer," which shows a 15-year-old cancer patient and the deer she has just shot through the heart.

But there's another kind of time here, too. It's not just an accounting of the years the people in these pictures have lived or a consideration of the ones they have left. It's not even the time it takes to take in the show, though you don't want to rush through this one. I'm talking about the time the artists spent.

Take "Showered," a painting by Emil Robinson of his fiancee, naked from the shoulders up, and wearing a shower cap. "This painting went through long and hard growing pains," Robinson writes in a statement accompanying the work. "Sometimes a long engagement produces an intimacy with a work from all of the touching and growing." Is he talking about painting or getting married?

You can feel a little something of that long engagement when you stand in front of his picture, which earned a commendation from the jurors. It makes you want to tap the brakes and stare. It's a moment -- and so much more -- in a single glance.

Painter David Gracie, who contributes an untitled portrait of a man in a button-down shirt, describes his practice as "devotional, diagnostic and commemorative." It bespeaks the patience of a clinician -- how to get the mouth just right -- and an attentiveness bordering on reverence. Call it deep looking.

Even the photographs show it. Sure, it takes only a second to snap a camera's shutter, but there's a sense of duration, for lack of a better word, in the best ones. A sense of past and possible future. Yolanda del Amo's double portrait, "Sarah, David" (another commendation winner), depicts a couple on the verge of divorce. You can feel something remorse? relief? resolve? hovering in the air. Washingtonian Bruce McKaig goes one step further in his portrait of artist Rachelle Knowles, which uses digital technology to stitch together a series of multiple portraits into a time-lapse movie.

We're used to thinking of portraits as freeze frames. But there is no "now," the show seems to say. Only that space -- simultaneously dimensionless and eternal -- between who we used to be and who we are becoming.