What Is a Portrait?

Journal 01: What Is a Portrait?

What makes a portrait recognisable if it does not show a face? In this reflection, I explore how conversation, metaphor and lived experience can reveal a deeper kind of likeness—one rooted not in appearance, but in being truly seen.

When people first encounter my work, they often ask the same question.

"How can these be portraits when they don't show the person's face?"

It's a fair question.

For centuries portrait painting has been associated with likeness. A successful portrait was judged by how accurately it represented the face of the sitter. We instinctively search for recognisable features, hoping to identify the person before us.

My paintings begin somewhere else.

Each portrait begins with conversation. Sometimes those conversations unfold over weeks, sometimes over many months. We speak about memories, relationships, fears, resilience and hope. Images emerge naturally as people search for ways to describe experiences that often resist ordinary language.

One participant once described themselves as "a twisted rose, growing out of the dark into the light, but still carrying the scars of the past."

That single metaphor became the foundation not only for one painting, but for the way I have approached portraiture ever since. It wasn't compelling because it was visually striking. It mattered because it revealed something profound about how this person understood themselves.

This is where my paintings begin—not with appearance, but with meaning.

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we encounter the world through lived experience rather than detached observation. We do not simply possess bodies; we inhabit them. Many of the people I have worked with have experienced events that profoundly altered that lived experience, changing their relationship with themselves, with others and with the world around them. Rather than recording outward appearance, my paintings attempt to respond to that altered landscape.

As our conversations continue, the painting develops alongside them. Layers of paint are added, scraped back and repainted. Sometimes an image that once seemed essential disappears beneath another. Sometimes a fragment of colour, a bird, a staircase, broken glass, water or a rose gradually becomes the emotional centre of the work.

The portrait slowly becomes less about what someone looks like and more about what it feels like to be them.

Over time I realised that these metaphors were not simply poetic expressions; they were often the way people made sense of experiences that resisted direct description. When I later encountered the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue that metaphor shapes the way we think rather than merely the way we speak, I recognised something I had already begun to discover in the studio. This was echoed in the work of Costa and Steen, whose research into trauma narratives demonstrates how metaphor can provide a language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to express.

Again and again, my conversations begin not with explanations, but with images.

A twisted rose.

Broken glass.

A staircase leading towards the light.

My paintings grow from these images.

Perhaps this is why I have never thought of these works as portraits in the traditional sense. They are visual responses to dialogue. They are collaborative acts of listening.

Over the years, something unexpected began to happen. Participants started telling me that they felt seen through the paintings. At first this surprised me. After all, many of the portraits bore little physical resemblance to them. Gradually I came to realise that likeness and recognition are not the same thing. A painting can fail to capture a face, yet somehow recognise something deeper about a person's experience.

That realisation has become the thread connecting projects such as The Twisted Rose & Other Lives, Portraits of Isolation, Inside and Being Seen. Across more than forty conversations, I have become increasingly convinced that portraiture can do more than record identity. It can bear witness to experience.

This does not mean the paintings illustrate someone's life or attempt to explain it. I hope they do something quieter than that.

They invite us to pause before another person's story.

They remind us that identity is always richer than appearance.

And perhaps they encourage us to look a little longer before deciding that we have truly seen someone.

That is why I still think of these works as portraits. Not because they record how someone looks. But because they attempt, however imperfectly, to recognise something of who they are.

Next month, I'll explore the question that has gradually become central to both my practice and my research:

What does it mean to be truly seen?

Further Reading

Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (2010). Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry.

Costa, B. & Steen, G. (2014). Metaphor as a Window on Talk about Trauma and Post-Traumatic Growth.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.