Face Book

The Kingston Prize is a national biennial competition for portraiture and figurative painting based on real life. “The aim,” Jason Donville, a co-chair of the competition, explains in the preface to this hefty, handsome, and full-colour bilingual coffee-table book, “is to encourage and reward the creation of contemporary portraits by Canadian artists, to promote Canadian artists through competition, and, over time, to develop a historical record of Canadians, by Canadians.” Founded in 2005 by Kaaren and Julian Brown — who in 1962 settled in Kingston, Ontario, where they later raised their family — the contest is intended to generate a “visual history of national life, recording people of prominence, work and leisure activities, clothing and hairstyles, and, on the other side of the easel, the painting or drawing styles of the artists active in portraiture.”

But is anything in art as simple and clear-cut as that suggests? Thankfully, this competition does not pretend to universalize human nature or behaviour or daily life the way The Family of Man did in 1955, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A close look at the portraits reveals wide variations of face, body, fabric, attitude, gaze, and arrangement. There is a rich pluralism, without any pretense of postulating a specific human essence. For instance, the sitter’s ambiguous expression in Lauren Crazybull’s Power & Vulnerability is quite different than what we see in Shaun Downey’s winning Near the Elevator, where the woman seated by a window and within an essentially grey space brings to mind Vermeer. Is she resigned or simply passive? What is she thinking? Pamela Augustino’s Courage with Hearts offers a tableau, as the critic Tatum Dooley explains, of a young girl cosplaying an older woman, with signs of beauty rituals scattered throughout. Suzanne Paleczny’s dramatically striking Mask is different still — though my reading of the man depicted with lurid green face paint diverges from Dooley’s, because I do not see him standing in “an old-timey way with his hands on his hips.” I do agree that “the face paint becomes a shield,” but in my interpretation of the slightly slouched informal posture, I see a self-conscious rebel, a defiant outcast, a deliberate outsider — not a “military crusader” or “ship captain.” Which only goes to show that a performance within a portrait can be open to contrasting interpretations.

Temperament determines what an artist chooses to paint and how. In a vital sense, any portrait can be a visual meditation, with an emotional quotient beyond the photographic. In her 1978 review of Walter Benjamin’s Reflections, Susan Sontag noted that our transactions with the world always take place with things rather than with people — and that these transactions reveal meaning. “The more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious can be the mind which contemplates them,” she wrote. “Only because the past is dead is one able to read it. Only because history is fetishized in physical objects can one understand it.”

It’s good to keep these words in mind when viewing portraits with props, whether they’re framed photos, dress fabrics, books, desks, fruit bowls, masks, whips, or wallpapers suggesting prehistoric art, quilts, flags, rocks, clouds, or bottles on a shelf. Studied details of costumes and accessories (Edmund Haakonson’s Sergeant Beaudin) or backgrounds (Ben Darrah’s Owen in Red Jacket, Jennifer Walton’s icy Self-Portrait, Toronto Waterfront, March 2007, or Lorna Conquergood’s self-explanatory Velour) provoke interpretation while either suppressing or accentuating realism. This is not to overlook instances of stylized artifice (Jennifer Campbell’s After the Flood, with three men and two women in a red canoe, or Roselina Hung’s Self-Portrait in the Studio, where three romantic paintings on a wall and a reproduction of the artist’s self-portrait evoke a double consciousness) or surreal expressionism (Soraya Hutchinson’s Painting to Say Goodbye, where a woman gazes up at a ghostly male suspended upside down over her).

The frontal face portraits gathered in The Kingston Prize tend to be more self-declarative. Some are extreme close‑ups, such as Kristine Zingeler’s Facial Manipulation #5 (expressing nothing but its title), Kelcie De Wildt’s charcoal on paper Dad, and Michael Bayne’s Orange Grandma, with a face resembling wrinkled parchment. And on occasion there is too much literalism (the seated man in Sylvain Nadeau’s Vision intérieure has landscape painted over his entire body) or sentimentality (Nicole Sleeth’s Come Home, with its embracing couple). The pose becomes a defining element in others. For me, there are two brilliant standouts here. The first is Jen Mann’s Self-Portrait as a Reflection, with its sensational composition of textures and a restrained palette dominated by the silver of crushed foil and cosmetic paint laid on bare skin, framed by cascading brown hair. The other is Richard Davis’s Basement Self-Portrait, an intriguing composition of light, shape, and texture, where the subject’s face is only a sliver in an unframed rectangular mirror. In this painting, which won the competition in 2013, we mostly look upon the slightly arched back of a man as he gazes at himself.

To summarize the overarching allure of this fine book, we need only turn to Dooley’s essay, where she writes, “A portrait offers a unique proposition. It gives us the opportunity to look unwaveringly at another face.” In other words, “it unlocks our humanity.”