Craig Barnard makes portrait sculptures from life, which means he spends around twenty hours in a room with a face before it becomes a head.
He also paints and works in ceramics, but it is the sculpture that interests us here, because it is the slowest and most physical way anyone still looks at a human being. A photographer needs a fraction of a second. A painter needs sessions. A sculptor needs the person to be there, in three dimensions, turnable, for long enough that the pose collapses and something else takes its place.
We wrote to him because of two words in his profile: from life.
Almost everything else in the appearance conversation happens through a lens. Faces are photographed, filtered, cropped and flattened, and the flattening is so normal that we forget it is happening. Barnard works in the one medium that cannot flatten anything. His answers, sent from his studio and lightly edited only for length, are below.
You sculpt portraits from life rather than from photographs. What do you get in the room with someone that a photograph never gives you?
In the room everything is in three dimensions. I can turn the model to get different views and move myself around the model. When the model is not in pose and taking a break I can continue to observe. Photos are useful but video is better, especially with hands and feet.
Clay lets you keep changing a face for weeks. How do you know when to stop?
I could go on forever with a figure sculpture. In general, if it is a speculative piece, the time with the model is the end of a work. Normally around twenty hours is plenty of time. A portrait commission ends when the customer is happy with the likeness.
A sitter has to be still and stared at for hours. What happens to people over that time, and does it change the head you end up with?
The models need regular stretches and breaks, probably every fifteen to twenty minutes. The process of sculpting is exhausting for the artist as well. Apparently identifying your own mistakes and changing them opens up new pathways in your brain.
Sculpture forces you to deal with the back and the sides of a head, which almost nobody knows about their own. What do those parts tell you?
The back of your head, neck and hairline define how you look. The shape of your face and your look are lost within them. A self portrait teaches you how others see you. I had never seen the back of my own.
Where does likeness actually live? What small thing, done wrong, makes everyone say it is not them?
There are a lot of basics that can ruin the chances of a good likeness. The shape and depth of eyes is a big one. The nose and lips are obvious if they do not belong.
Given how closely you look at other faces, how do you feel about your own being looked at that closely?
I have had students sculpt me while I am working. It is really hard to hold a happy face rather than your miserable concentrating face.
Which head surprised you most, by turning out to be about something other than the person sitting in front of you?
I guess that my self portrait surprised me the most. As you said, we do not really know what we look like from the side or back. I have never seen the side of my face while brushing my teeth in a mirror. Have you?
That last question is the reason this project exists.
Everyone has an image of their own appearance, and everyone assembles it from a mirror, which shows one angle, reversed, in a fixed light, with the face arranged into the expression it makes when it knows it is being watched. Barnard spends his working life on the parts that fall outside that frame: the neck, the hairline, the skull under the hair, the concentrating face nobody chooses to wear. He is describing something bigger than sculpture. The version of ourselves we defend and manage is a small, heavily edited fragment of the thing other people actually see.
Sources: Instagram @craigbarnard1