Personal Style in Portraiture Painting – ‘Visual Dialogues With Water’ Analysis of the Portraiture by Eddy Ochieng
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Date
2020
Authors
Wango, Kamau
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
East African Nature and Science Organization
Abstract
Portraiture is arguably one of the most celebrated genres of art and artistic
expression through the ages. Artists have always sought to create depictions of
themselves in self-portraits as well as the depiction of sitters through in-person
posed sessions, referencing, or imagination. They have also used portraiture for
artistic expression particularly when aiming to depict human feelings and
emotions for the practical reason that human expression itself is synonymous
with facial expression. It is only through the study of physical facial expression
that an artist is able to derive artistic expression in a continuum that ranges from
extreme joy signified by laughter to extreme distress, signified by tears. In
between the continuum is a whole retinue of feelings and emotions, such as
amusement, happiness, irritation, anger, sorrow, despair, fear, anxiety, sadness,
and many other human manifestations that emanate from life’s experiences.
Apart from the obvious outer facial expressions, there are also the innate
expressions that underscore personality and character that artists wish to
unearth, study, and explore in their subjects. To execute and achieve these
expressions in portraiture, the artist uses selected media, styles, and techniques
that best suit the desired objective. This paper posits that there exists a
correlation between individual style and the effectiveness of the intended
purpose of portraiture where effectiveness applies to the communicative or
expressive value of a portrait as well as its overall acclaim. It must be noted that
there is no portraiture that lacks intent, be it portrayal of likeness from selfportraits or sitters or portraits derived from photographs, thematic referencing
that leads to the depiction of certain facial expressions in subject matter or
creating portraiture from imagination including surrealistic inspirations. When
certain portraiture is at times perceived as not being effective in terms of its intent, it is fair to conclude that this may often be as a result of the personal style
of the artist or its execution being incompatible with the intended purpose.
Hence viewers fail to see or extract what was intended for them to decipher
essentially because they are distracted by the personal style. In the same token,
when portraiture is seen to be effective, it is often presupposed that this is a result
of the personal style of the artist and its execution being deemed compatible
with its intended purpose. Hence to a significant extent, the viewer is able to
extract this purpose because they are aided by rather than distracted by the style
and specifically, personal stylistic rendition. This paper examines the portraiture
of Eddy Ochieng, an outstanding Kenyan hyperrealist in order to ascertain
whether there exists this visual correlation between his personal style and the
intent of his portraiture. He embraces the hyperrealism style featuring some selfportraits as well as of others derived from photographs. The inquiry is whether
this style delves into any other meaning other than the quest for the photographic
representation of likeness and whether the likeness itself is effectively extracted.
Description
Article
Keywords
Stylistic Framework, Visual Dialogue, Physiognomy, Self-Image, Egoism
Citation
Wango, K. (2020). Personal Style in Portraiture Painting–‘Visual Dialogues with Water’Analysis of the Portraiture by Eddy Ochieng. East African Journal of Arts and Social Sciences, 2(1), 134-153.