Portraits of the Soul

About Face: Portraiture Now at the Long Beach Museum of Art shows the works of 35 artists who use paint, pastels, graphite, or colored pencil to depict real-life contemporary people.

Fear, 2004, oil on wood, by Bobbie Moline-Kramer at the Long Beach Museum of Art

he portrait is one of the oldest genres in art. A portrait not only records the visual essence of an individual, it also captures and documents the dress, style, setting, mood, and era in which that individual lived. About Face: Portraiture Now at the Long Beach Museum of Art assembles the work of 35 contemporary artists who work in a masterly realistic style in paint, pastels, graphite, or colored pencil to depict real-life contemporary people, many from Southern California. There is a sense of turning the pages of a family album. Many of the portraits are about neighbors, friends, heroes, and in one case, a favorite local chef, Sean Cheetham of Chantal.

Another feature of the exhibition is the range of types of sitters. They are young and old, rich and poor, and come from a variety of cultures. But how each artist portrays the figure is the essence of the exhibition. Capturing an expression or catching a person off-guard conveys the soul of the internal human being in an external form. We see their history, personality, inner strength, sadness, or joie de vivre.

Among the most moving works is Bill Vuksanovich’s colored pencil portrait of two identical twin girls. It is in Renaissance style where only the figure is seen and the backdrop is completely black. The girls stand close together, holding hands, as they face the viewer. Vuksanovich has a knack for finding the individuality in each child who, in this case, is termed identical. The artist, while studying each girl, found them dissimilar and shows in his portrait their individual spirit – not their identical physical form. One seems protective of the other; one seems cautious. One seems more outgoing; the other timid. Both are rendered in a classic style that is unforgettable; the portrait has a powerful effect.

Bobbi Moline-Kramer looks for emotions. In some of her portraits, emotions are extreme, such as surprise or fear, or being startled. Moline-Kramer chose actors for her models because she believed they could convey a heightened sense of emotion. To her surprise, she found that authenticity came from people who were more in touch with who they are rather than those who could pretend to be something else.

The exhibition includes some exceptional charcoal drawings. Susan Hauptman creates a riveting Self Portrait using charcoal on paper. Her style is meticulous, capturing every detail, even making us think that the oversized black and white portrait could be a photograph. Lara Nguyen gives us one of the largest figurative drawings in the exhibition. It represents the folklore her father told her and her sisters about hair-pulling as a cure for headaches.

Our Lady of the Phonepoles, 2007, oil on canvas, by Michael Sokolis

While most portraits capture the look of a human being, Peter Zokowsky paints a portrait of artist Sergio Teran as he enacts his alter ego, the Mexican masked wrestler El Santo. The symbolic portrait is about endurance and the Mexican idea of martyred saints.

Although it is not part of the exhibition, on the second floor are portraits from the permanent collection, created years ago. In both exhibitions artists paint in a realistic manner, but the contemporary artists in the current exhibition, even though they use traditional techniques of overlays and glazes, have a style unlike those of the past. Inevitably, the current work evokes the times in which these sitters live.

FOR MORE INFORMATION What About Face: Portraiture Now When Through March 23 Where Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, (562) 439-2119; www.lbma.org

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to Coast Magazine »