Gainsborough’s Blue Boy

I’ll wager Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727-1788) “Blue Boy” began life as a “Blue Toddler” or a “Blue Infant.” I’ve seen three-month growth spurts in boys that obliterated their baby fat. Painting children in the middle of a growth spurt is as dramatic an experience as Van Gogh chasing his landscape shadows, just before he shot himself.

I believe growth spurts caused all sorts of problems for our early portrait painters and is one reason many early paintings of children look like an El Greco portrait, stretched and elongated. Imagine a young boy standing next to his favorite horse, growing taller, while the painter pursues spatial relationships.

At one time I delivered the wrong commissioned portrait to a mother who said “that’s not my daughter.”

“Are you sure?” I asked; as if a mother didn’t know her own child and thinking there had been another growth spurt.

One reason most children’s portraits are relegated to the attic or loosely tossed into some drawer is that our early images appear/ seem/ important only to us and recognizable only by us.

[Consider, if all portraits of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln were oil paintings of them as infants, what would our money look like?]

Luckily, I meet men and women (and briefly, become a part of their lives), who understand and recognize what they have; that is, these few moments in time that belong to them.

When we become adults we handle all our early images with indifference. We are unaware of our importance to our parents, our children, and to society. What pleasure to find my mother’s passport photograph when I was a decade older than that image; or, to see an old black-and-white film of her girlishly giggling and my father behaving in a goofy manner. What unbelievable wonder to view these images years after their death with a family of my own.

It can be a miserable time to be a portrait painter when we are able to delete an image with the press of a thumb or a flick of a finger. Thank heaven our predecessors did not live in a digital age. We should take a page from their example and capture our and others’ image to celebrate who we are today, everyday, and every decade of our lives.

Because in the end, we are all we have.

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.

©Ida Kotyuk

www.portraits-oils.com