Director’s Cut: In Conversation with Shannon Reynolds

As is doubtless the case with most artists’ working space, Shannon Reynolds’ studio provides a kind of partial archaeological record of her work over the years. In her case the studio is in the attic of her house, up a set of narrow stairs, and the work is portrait painting. You can see early renderings of her friends and acquaintances leaning alongside a current series of linked paintings called Suspect Profiles, close-up black-and-white portraits, done mugshot-style, in profile and full face against a background of gridlines. You can’t see any of Drinks in Hand—another series, nearly two dozen images of various hands holding various drinks—because those have all sold. But you can still see the large canvases of Dramatis Personae, a series in progress in which amateur models take on theatre’s iconic character roles: heroes tragic and dashing, villains of varied stripe, femmes fatales and ingenues.

Shannon and I studied English together years ago, and since then it’s been a pleasure to watch her develop a body of work as a painter. Dramatis Personae, with its mix of visual art, theatre, and  literature, is easily the most ambitious project she’s set out for herself yet. As it gathered momentum, she and I exchanged a series of e-mail messages about her goals, methods, and challenges; these were later edited and pieced together into the Q&A that follows. In reading it over, I’m struck by how much Shannon’s speaking voice seems to inhabit this written text. Her paintings create the sense of a discrete episode in time that belies the process behind them; this “conversation,” we hope, does much the same thing.

As an artist, when and why did you gravitate toward portrait painting, as opposed to abstracts or landscapes or whatever?

I’ve always been fascinated by portraits in art galleries, but I can’t really remember a single moment when I decided to paint people. I do think the move toward figurative painting came in art school in university, after I’d done some life drawing. The human figure is never boring, and there’s no way to cheat—we all know the body so well that we see problems in representation instantly. I guess I like the challenge of portraiture because there’s the pressure to get it right while still enjoying the medium and the process.

There’s that famous Robert Frost remark that writing free-verse poetry is like playing tennis without the net. Does painting a real person provide the net?

Yes, because the net provides not just structure for the game, but a means of evaluation. Most artists, regardless of style or medium, set themselves some arbitrary parameters to work within. Even the most seemingly liberated form may follow a convention of its own. A recent Harper’s article suggests that the free verse of e.e. cummings, with its vertical and fragmented style, may have followed the conventions of the ancient Greek poetry he had studied on fragments of ancient tablets.

So I suppose that my net is the real person I’ve chosen to represent, and the game is to make both a good likeness and a decent painting. I remember reading a quotation by Edgar Degas, who painted many landscapes as well as his more famous ballet and toilette paintings. He said something to the effect that all you need to paint a landscape is a glimpse of the passing countryside out the window of a train. It’s true in a sense: landscapes are easier to invent than people. I love the close observation that painting a human figure necessarily involves, not to mention the crucial contact, however brief, with a living subject.

You tend to paint your own portraits mostly from photographs. You’ve told me before that working from a real-life sitting model is preferable, but in most cases impractical. What do you lose when working from photographs, and what do you gain?

Photographs grant me time, which is both their benefit and their drawback. With time, I can relax and achieve any degree of finish in the painting, but time can also rob me of the feeling of tense engagement and the pressure to perform that I have when I paint or draw from a live model. Photographs also reduce a three-dimensional living person to two static dimensions, which I overcome somewhat by taking multiple photographs and making preliminary sketches. But perhaps the biggest problem with using photographs is that they are regarded as robbers of authenticity. Like all optical aids since Leonardo’s camera obscura, photographic reference seems to challenge the romantic notion of art as pure and unmediated by technology—an impossible proposition, and one at odds with the very word art.

How do your literary background and interest in writing influence your painting? The Dramatis Personae series would seem to be an obvious example, but is the influence felt in your other work as well?

You know, it’s really been a struggle for me to find common ground between these two competing loves of mine. Everyone seems to assume that there’s a common thread, but it was hard to find academic links, and harder still to incorporate literary influences and ideas in painting. I find sometimes that an idea easy to express eloquently in words might be overly obvious or simplistic when translated to a visual medium. At the same time, I think a lot of contemporary visual art could be better expressed in essays. Concept and execution, one of them an intellectual process and the other a very physical and technical endeavour, don’t always live comfortably together. For most of us, our first exposure to art in a broad sense is in book illustration. Pictures dominate at first, then share the space with text, then disappear. As adults, we look at pictures on their own, in galleries, where, in a complete reversal, essays are often required to explain the images. My parents were both illustrators, and I think the notion that a picture has something to say is still deeply rooted in my idea of art-making. Narrative paintings were very much out of fashion when I went through art school.

What do you mean by narrative painting?

Essentially, painting that tells a story. Norman Rockwell’s cover art would be the obvious and much-maligned populist example. Other well known 20th-century examples include the work of the Wyeth family, and many of David Hockney’s paintings. For me, one of the enduring attractions of portraiture is that almost any portrait could prompt questions that may lead to the construction of a narrative: who is this person, how old, how rich, why is she worthy of a portrait, etc.

In recent years you’ve focused much of your energy on series of linked paintings. What draws you to that approach as opposed to individual paintings? Is it a way of creating a narrative over multiple paintings?

Well, first, I was working away in my studio for years, producing occasional portraits and doing illustration work for local companies, but I had no real audience. I wanted an audience for my work—one that went beyond the friends and families of the people who bought my portraits. I also had no body of work. Everything I did was a one-off, so I had no way of really measuring my own development as an artist. Also, from a purely practical perspective, galleries are generally more interested in showing series of works, or at least bodies of work with a consistent theme.

These projects may also be attempts to make my portraits say more than they would otherwise. In both Suspect Profiles and Dramatis Personae, and even the drinks series, to some extent, I have assembled a cast of characters. I suppose the obvious next step, left to the viewer, is to decide how they all fit together and create the story.

You mentioned that narrative paintings were out of fashion when you were in art school. Do you still find that portraiture is taken less seriously by the fine art establishment?

I think some of the skepticism around portraiture has always had to do with its bourgeois consumers—it’s a form that caters to the wealthy. The portrait painter is sometimes viewed as more of a panderer than a serious artist. But I think portraiture is and continues to be more complex than that. In a sense, these probably unsellable portrait series I’m making right now are an attempt to escape the label of the sellout artist—an unjust stigma and one that ensures that artists largely remain underpaid. Like most artists, I’m skeptical of, but partly in thrall to, the mythologies that surround this profession (or calling, for the romantics).

Recently portraits have been enjoying a bit of a renaissance, although I’m sure they never really went away. But lately I’ve noticed a lot of public galleries dusting off their portraiture collections and showing them alongside contemporary portraits. Narrative paintings are enjoying a similar comeback. Eliza Griffiths is one critically acclaimed Canadian portrait artist—she paints the same characters again and again in various intimate and familiar dramas.

The Toronto painter Joanne Tod got a lot of press a couple of years ago for her Vanity Fair series, in which she depicted various media types as characters from the Thackeray novel. Was that project an influence on Dramatis Personae?

I’ve admired Joanne Tod’s work since I was first introduced to it in art school. She is one of a few representational artists who bridge the chasm between craft and concept and who manage to walk the fine line between social relevance and didacticism. Her Vanity Fair series received a lot of notice at around the same time I was drafting my first audition calls. I suffered momentarily from the anxiety of influence, but shrugged it off when I realized that her series relied on celebrity and specificity and a single famous but largely unread Victorian novel, while mine was an attempt to lift unknown actors to familiarity by placing them in universal roles. I would prefer to say her series had no influence, but it would be more truthful to admit that I hoped mine would differ enough to escape the comparisons.

How did your vision for Dramatis Personae first take shape? What drew you to the conceit of the theatrical production?

I think it was a portrait I did for a newly wealthy Toronto family that really started me thinking about the behind-the-scenes machinations of portraiture. For that painting, I was set designer and props provider as well as director. We spread a Persian rug in their beautifully landscaped backyard, as though for a picnic, and we placed fruit baskets around. The family dressed in their finery and together we orchestrated a pastoral scene. The painting referenced Manet’s “Le dejeuner sur l’herb” in composition (though certainly not in shock value). It was an entirely contrived tableau, and yet I think the final painting was successful, both as a portrait and as something that conveyed a carefully orchestrated image of wealth, comfort, pride, and happiness: my subjects as they wanted to be seen. It was a mini-drama. Only the audience reaction was missing.

I think the desire to emphasize the connection between portraiture and theatre has been with me since then. Usually the portraits I do are less obviously contrived—although we still work just as hard to create the illusion of naturalism. Portraiture is always affected to some degree—even when the subject appears to be unaware that they’re being observed, this is seldom the case.

A lot of the early portraits you did had a very candid feel. Are you deliberately turning that on its head by having all the Dramatis Personae subjects face the painter (and the viewer) directly?

The gaze has long been a key subject of discussion for art critics. Simply put, an averted gaze in the subject allows unchecked voyeurism by the viewer, while a direct gaze confronts the viewer and empowers the subject. The direct eye contact by most of the subjects in the series certainly underlines their active participation.

I imagine that, like the family you mentioned, most subjects ostensibly want you to capture them as they are, but also want to project a very specific image of themselves. Is there a fine line between “capturing” the subject and presenting them in a light they won’t appreciate?

I’m not sure if there is a line. But perception is key. I don’t believe any of my portraits are perfect likenesses, and yet they are always recognizable. Even the term “catching” someone seems to suggest our fascination with dismantling a constructed persona—the celebrity caught shopping without make-up, the cellulite glimpsed on sunbathing supermodels. Portraitists of the past are often accused of calculating flattery to please their subjects, but I think it’s hard to change much without risking the loss of the likeness.

Many of the most famous portraitists today are those who are merciless in their depictions of their subjects—think of Lucien Freud’s painting of Queen Elizabeth II—but they risk descending to caricature just as much as the flatterers do. One astute review of Freud’s royal portrait noted that “unflattering isn’t necessarily equivalent to psychologically insightful.” Sometimes, I think what is “caught” might have more to do with the artist’s perception of himself in relation to the sitter and to his aesthetic sense in general than with anything inherent in the subject.

How much does your own knowledge of, or relationship with, a subject affect the final result? Are you able to better render someone if you know them personally, or do you feel that you’re limited by what your eye can see?

I think familiarity with the subject I’m painting is always a boon. One of my actors—Georgina, who’s playing the lusty woman—is a professional life model whom I’ve been drawing for years, and I feel completely at ease painting her. In art school, you’re always told to unlearn the little conventions of drawing that you’ve been using expediently up until then, and to draw only what you see. But so much of sight is bound up in perception that I think as long as I maintain a self-conscious stance of observing, the informed view always trumps the naïve.

So that’s a long-winded way of saying, yes, familiarity helps. If I know you, I can recognize you when you emerge on my canvas; otherwise I’m as uncertain of an accurate likeness as anyone else. I only paint what I see, but sight itself is bound up with what we know. There are so many times when we think we see something—in a photograph, or outside—but when we get closer we perceive that it was actually something else entirely.

So how did you arrive at your list of stock roles for Dramatis Personae?

I got the basic list first from the top of my head, then by reading about various theatre styles, especially those that use a set cast of characters for every play, like the commedia dell’arte of the Italian Renaissance. I also queried people about the roles they regarded as essential. The final list was arbitrary and makes no claims to being either strict or exhaustive. I’ll just keep amassing my cast until it seems somehow complete.

Tell me about the process of finding actors. I know you put out a call to friends and acquaintances; from there has it basically been word of mouth?

Yes, it’s been almost all word of mouth. I’ve been talking about this project with everyone I know for the past two years—all of the artists I draw with and in fact almost everyone I met. But people have seemed shy about contacting me directly. That is, until I contacted one of our local theatre companies, who sent the audition notice out to professional and student actors. They were much less shy about initiating contact. As it turned out, though, the roles the professional actors wanted were ultimately filled by
unknowns. I may yet turn to “real” actors for some of the remaining roles, but I’m inclined to think that amateur actors may be better for this project. They’re more inclined to rely on their own idiosyncratic notions of their roles, and I’m enjoying being surprised by their interpretations, and the sometimes unexpected ways in which they see their roles.

How so?

In the case of the coquette, I had a very specific (but possibly not quite accurate) idea in mind: Henry James’s depiction of Daisy Miller as the young, unthinking American girl whose flouting of social convention leads to her label as a flirt and ultimately her death. But my coquette actor had been influenced by the cheesy pin-up calendars of the 1940s and ’50s, and her interpretation of the role couldn’t be better. I slipped my version in by inserting some text from Daisy Miller into the background.

Sometimes, what I perceived as an actor’s particular suitability for a role actually backfired a little. I had approached Muffy St. Bernard, a fabulous local drag queen, about the role of the