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What’s So Striking in These 5 Contemporary Portrait Paintings
Updated: 2 days ago
Portraits are storytellers; they hide more than they reveal. Suspense is created to intrigue viewers. Sometimes a glance, a smile, a wrinkle, or a curve on a figure hides much deeper truths. That’s why the half-smile of Mona Lisa still allures the world.
Self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh, The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, or da Vinci’s eternal muses fascinate us more than any picture puzzle.
Here lies the magic of portrait paintings. It is not about creating likeness; it’s more about capturing a human presence with an untold story.
Portraits are not about the sitters alone; it is about how the subjects are seen by the creators. It’s more about the artists, how they want to reveal the secrets, the emotions they choose to reveal, and the stories they wish to tell.
Viewers are not only awed by the technical skill of the artists but also by the striking narratives on themes like humanity, ethnicity, social norms, and personal experiences.
For budding portrait makers prepping for an international portrait competition, there’s enough inspiration to create stunning works of art. It pays to explore perspectives, signature styles, and notable works of contemporary portrait visionaries like John Currin, Amy Sherald, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Lucian Freud, and Tim Noble-Sue Webster. Let’s think beyond just beautiful portraits!
John Currin: Reinventing Classical Realism with Modern Satire
"Your style is who you are when you're not trying to be clever or better than you actually are."
John Currin, the American painter, is known for his ability to blend old classical paintings with modern cultural messages. His portraits look almost satirical, pop-culture-like, and remarkable as he exaggerates the proportions of his caricature-like figures. It’s no wonder he has been deeply inspired by Renaissance portraiture; he improvises, mixing wit and humor in the classical look.
In one of his popular pieces, like The Bra Shop, he paints his subjects in minute detail. It’s his take on commercialization: how beauty and femininity are being exploited by a consumerist culture. His intentional exaggeration of proportions makes the viewers feel something unsettling about the regular standards of beauty.
What emerging artists can learn from his portraits –
Currin’s portraits look classy yet thought-provoking. They are very much contemporary. Budding portrait artists can learn how he mixes technical skill with personal perspective and social commentary.
Especially his stylized portrayal of women can be something artists must study. They question the traditional norms of society, like how we define beauty.
Amy Sherald: Celebrating Identity Through Grayscale
"I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe."
When it comes to documenting contemporary African identity through portraiture, Amy Sherald is the name we can relate to. She captures the unique African American experience as an unexpected, arresting, and intimate portrayal of reality.
Amy’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama gained much critical acclaim in the international art community, where she shows color contrasts of grayscale and vibrant shades. As usual, she paints her subjects in grayscale, surrounded by radiant colors. The shift from normal skin tone to grayscale shifts the attention of viewers to humanity and presence rather than racial identity. The portrait of Michelle Obama looks more personal than ceremonial.
What emerging artists can learn from Amy’s portraits—
Amy focuses more on the individuality and personality of the portraits rather than just painting likeness.
For emerging artists, it helps to understand how to build strong narratives through minimalist contemporary designs.
Her portraits look more emotionally authentic than iconic. They can learn how painters can become the true storytellers of human experience without being elaborate.
Tai-Shan Schierenberg: Painting Personality Beyond Likeness
"I relied on my eyes really."
Another British portrait artist, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, won worldwide recognition for his powerful portraits – painting beyond resemblance. It’s remarkable to see how he captures the intellectual depth and physiological truth in his lifelike portrait paintings.
More than photographic precision, the artist aims for textural depth. His use of textures often reminds us of the artist Lucian Freud. In one of his acclaimed portraits, like Christopher Hitchens, he uses broad brushwork and unusual textures to reveal the strength of the character in the portrayal. He documented Hitchens’s bold spirit and sharp mind more than his accurate looks to show how a powerful public thinker can be represented with honesty.
What emerging artists can learn from Schierenberg’s portraits –
Contemporary portrait artists can follow Schierenberg's works to see how the inner life of the sitter can be revealed through brushstrokes and painterly textures, going beyond likeness.
Lucian Freud: Finding Truth in Human Bodies
"I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be."
We have talked about the British artist Lucian Freud while discussing textural portraits of Tai-Shan Schierenberg. This gifted artist is celebrated for his nude art and his most impressive portraits of our times.
Explore Freud’s famous portrait paintings, which use the layered technique of impasto. In his instinctive portraits, he paints human figures as he sees them, with all their imperfection – without any obsession with precision. They show up with their imperfections and a human face.
In his oil-on-canvas creation, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, Freud focuses on psychological realism. He painted one of his friends, a job center supervisor, reclining nude on a sofa, unguarded. He depicted the human condition with intense scrutiny. The way he depicted the sleeping lady supervisor, exposed to a male gaze, shows something liberating – the way female vulnerabilities cope with changing times. It is indeed a bold portrait.
Freud observes his subjects for months and years to paint them analytically. His patience and eye for detail can be an inspiration for emerging artists who follow pathbreaking and evolving styles in portraiture. It shows that sometimes authentic depictions are far better than being perfect.
Tim Noble: Working Shadow Portraits Through Innovation
“I think anything that's a bit of a rocket up the arse, anything that kicks against the routine, against the mundane things that close down your mind, is a refreshing and good thing,” – Tim Noble
Tim Noble and Sue Webster, the artist duo known for their shadow sculptures, add a new dimension to the art of portraiture. Their installations include discarded materials, which often look chaotic to a viewer. But when lights are directed at them from a desired angle, they create extraordinary shadow portraits.
Their self-portrait masterpiece is made as an assemblage of metal casts of dead insects they have welded together to create an unusual sculptural effect. When lights fall on them, the shadows look quite different from the objects that create them.
Another remarkable work, like Dirty White Trash with Gulls is also made with discarded personal items as trash, casting figurative shadows that resemble the artist duo.
What emerging artists can learn from Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s shadow portraits –
This artist duo uses light and shadow, scrap metal, garbage, sex toys, and some humor to create awe-worthy sculptural portraits. They make portraiture an interactive experience, encouraging emerging artists working in sculpture or mixed media to ideate and innovate and to experiment with unconventional media to redefine the experience.
Can You Bring Back the Timeless Appeal of Portrait Artworks in the Age of Procreate and AI?
The journey of portraits from Renaissance humanism to dramatic portraits of the Baroque era, from 19th-century Impressionism to 20th-century abstraction and 21st-century psychological portraits, has been truly fascinating. The scope widens, making room for contemporary media like digital and mixed media to reflect the cultural changes, as art evolves with time.
In recent times, software like Adobe Photoshop and Procreate, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR) are used to create likeness, reshaping the boundaries of figurative and portrait art. Artists use digital 3D brushes to create interactive portraits, pushing the limits of creativity.
In this digitized era, the need for human presence feels more profound and indispensable. From Caravaggio’s art of Chiaroscuro to merging personal and cultural experiences, what remains timeless is the human story crafted through faces and figures.
Can you really bring back the enduring charm of portrait art in the age of augmented reality? Let’s figure it out in the next international portrait competition by TERAVARNA.
Submissions are open.
