Portraiture by South African Artist Jeremy Van Der want

The meaning of a portrait to this South African artist

The meaning of art is yet mysterious. I am a South African artist and I spent my life making art of one sort of another and the best explanation that I have of exactly what I’m doing is what one of my teachers told me when I was young. She said that all of the artworks we make are really self-portraits. Whether we are painting a dog, a cat, a landscape, an abstract or indeed a portrait of another person we are engaged in an act of self-expression and are to some extent rendering an image of some element of ourselves. The way we feel and think is present in the work, even the choice of subject matter reveals the artist. But there is more to an artwork than only what the artist has put into it. There is also the viewer. A person who encounters an artwork is also living a subjective experience of their life and encounters the artwork subject to their own bias and expectations. And so we enter the mirror world of art. The question of whose reality we are observing becomes important. This is why I found my project to draw pictures of people who live in extremis on the streets of Johannesburg so terribly interesting because I was presenting an image created by me of them for them to show to others. An opportunity for self-reflection but also an opportunity to express the self by presenting it to others.

Portrait Commissions

I still paint and draw portraits. I find the process quite lovely. Particularly when painting pictures of people’s children which is often what am I asked to do. Quite often I have not met the children in particular and find myself wondering about them as I carefully paint their appearance onto a canvas.

Drawing by South African artist J. Van Der want