IF YOU WANT TO LOSE A FRIEND, PAINT HIS PORTRAIT
Writing portraits is a job that is often ungrateful. Relationships can be damaged by both the grotesque and the humor, as well as the accuracy and seriousness of the image, etc.
There is a lot of evidence. Valentine Serov’s relationship with A. Benoit was irreparably damaged by the ‘caricature’ of his wife’s portrait (pictures of Serov’s work were taken from the internet).
Because of some images, my relationships with friends and relatives have not improved, as they perceive themselves differently.
There are only a dozen portraits in memory that have been taken over by prototypes. There are ‘Tamara Georgiyevna’, ‘Tick of a Cross’, a portrait of Angela ‘Coffee in Armenian’, and a portrait of Sergei. It’s possible that it’s polite.
For myself, I realized one thing: no one forces an author to write a portrait of the depicted face in its actual age. You can make a portrait from the past. No one forces to do the work in detail, with photographic similarity – you can make the work schematic, etc. However, in this case there is no guarantee of demand for the work. Therefore, any wishes should not cause changes to the original author, whose fidelity I am convinced of.