On Semiotics, Portraits, and Perspective...

Is what others see in us real?

This week, artist Michael McEwan painted my daughters’ portraits, a privilege we enjoyed largely because my mother owns a gallery in Bexley, Ohio, which shows his work.

Michael began the portraits this summer while painting live in the gallery, birthing a mentor-mentee relationship between him and my three first graders, after which one of them, Gwen, dove head-first into her passion for painting. A natural teacher, Michael brought them sketchbooks, good pens, and canvasses, on which Gwen painted a series of winter landscapes with perspective, a skill he taught her during one of those Friday sessions.

This week, watching Michael study each of my triplet’s faces as he planned his approach and laid his color palette, I was the one thinking about perspective, wondering what he saw in them. On what did he focus in that minute-gaze before painting?

As a writer, I had some ideas. His look resembled one I make when gazing out my window to conceive of setting: judgement, the interpretive lens that creates a gap between the real-life object (the signified) and its depiction on a canvass or a page (the image or signifier).

An entire field of study, called semiotics, exists to study this gap. Semiotics might be most easily understood from a simple example: if you were to ask a room full of people what they think of when hearing the word “tree,” everyone would have a different answer. Mountain folks might think of pine or aspen; Midwesterners might conceive of a maple; someone might imagine that one tree scraping against the siding of their childhood home.

Though this space between signifier and signified makes language inexact, accounting for most misunderstandings, it also allows for creativity. In it, artists exist and thrive. I knew Michael would utilize this distance, the portraits becoming not exact replicas of my daughters, but interpretations of them. Which begs the question: where is the value in that interpretation?

Perhaps it lay in the artist’s critical distance, needed to capture the essence of something otherwise too complex to understand up close.

Many artists have explored this subject in their own work; in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, for example, her character understands the world she came from only when she steps away and views it from the sea, saying, “One feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they’d never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives.” That distance—and the realization of it—can disorient us, allowing us to see ourselves as Other, or it can awaken us to new understandings of self.

In other words, in stepping back and gazing at ourselves through the artist’s eyes, we might glimpse a part of ourselves we cannot see in real life, an essence captured in the artist’s choices. Haven’t you always been curious how an artist might depict you? What, even, a caricature artist might do with your features, for example making one prominent and another disappear?  

Michael is a talker, and so while he squeezed the tubes of oil paint and made quick brush strokes, he discussed these creative choices, comparing artists painting portraits to journalists writing articles: “Journalists know they can’t just dictate the answers to interview questions and publish that, as is.” They weave in the material, structure the information, digest it for readers. Writers know they must do this, Michael expounded, perhaps thinking of his many mentees, but it’s not easy to teach artists to do it; instead, they want to spit back exactly what they see, as though replicating reality is the goal.

Aristotle might agree, once saying, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is true art.” Aristotle’s statement suggests that each object contains an essence unchanged by its outward appearance. In other words, “treeness” exists regardless of what we conceive when he hear the word “tree.” We know a tree when we see one because of that essence. We know a Gwen when we see her, too, likely when she behaves in a standard “Gwen” way, no matter what she looks like that day.

But, I wonder, how much of that essence can we see in ourselves?

Later, when Michael said, “Artists shouldn’t write their own artist’s statements,” I’m pretty sure he was referring to his own struggle to write—because he is a painter and not a writer. But this statement got me thinking of our collective inabilities to see—let alone verbalize or depict—ourselves. It’s a difficult skill reserved for memoirists and self-portraitists, one hardly done well, even by them. An artist struggles to verbalize his intent not merely because he is not a writer, but because one struggles to identify the essence of self. Similarly, novelists might find writing the one-page synopsis of their novel more difficult than writing the novel. How does one see ‘Self,’ with all its history, with its many complexities, years of aging and experience, with all its layers and iterations? We must go instead to someone else—a psychotherapist, an artist, an editor, a friend willing to be honest—and ask for help.  

Interestingly, the two fraternal triplets’ portraits turned out more similar than the identical pair’s. Perhaps because Michael saw something within them—a shared experience or world perspective—resembling each other. They are sisters, after all, two-thirds of a set, making me wonder what experience might have changed the third. What makes her, that one half of an identical pair, so different from the other two? Maybe nothing. Maybe Michael’s paintings reflect more himself than they do my daughters’ selves, and the “essence” he sees is merely the result of a change in light or a sudden difference in mood.

I doubt even Michael would be able to verbalize the answer to these questions. He already gave me one, in the form of three portraits, which, for me, only raise more questions about what makes us each unique or connected and what exists in an artist’s eye. And maybe that is the point, raising questions. It is, perhaps, what an artist does best.

6 year-old Gwen’s portrait of me