Monie Szabó paints portraits in oil and graphite in Gothenburg, mostly in black and white, and she also photographs the people she paints.
She runs her own gallery, teaches, and takes commissions, but the part of her practice that interested us is the choosing. She does not wait for a commission to decide who is worth a painting. She picks her subjects herself, mostly public faces, and only after she has read everything she can find about them.
The reason we wrote to her is that she works against the obvious assumption about portraiture.
A portrait is supposed to be about a face. Szabó treats the face as the obstacle, the thing standing between the viewer and the person. Her answers, sent from her studio and lightly edited only for length, are below.
When a sitting begins, what does the sitter try to show you, and what shows up anyway?
First of all, I paint from photographs, not live. So it is more what I am looking for in a face. For me, I look for the spirit of the person, who they are behind their actual looks. I look for the truth, so to speak. There is no point in just painting a portrait, I want to capture what is behind the subject’s eyes. So when I decide to paint someone, and I mostly paint public faces, known musicians, actors and so on, I research the heck out of him or her in order to get a feeling of who they are. Then I pick a photograph that I feel represents my feeling of them. It is not about their looks, handsome or not, it is about who they are behind their face. What makes me decide who to paint is if they fascinate me as a person, like the painting of Steve Valentine, the actor, magician and writer, that I am about to start, or if there is something in their eyes that captures my interest.
Oil and graphite: what does each of them let you say about a face that the other cannot?
Since I mostly paint black and white portraits, there is really not much difference between the two. At least not for me. Graphite is easier since you can erase your mistakes, whereas in oil I need to wait until it dries before I can correct it.
People say a portrait looks like someone, or that it does not. In your experience, what actually decides that?
The symmetry, first and foremost. But then it can also be the eyes, or the attitude. It is a complex question, as people view someone with their own set of eyes, meaning their own inner programming, feelings, biases and experiences.
You teach. What is the hardest habit to get a student to stop doing when they paint a face?
Rush. That is without a doubt the single hardest thing to stop a student from doing.
What happens to a portrait when you correct an asymmetry, and what happens when you leave it in?
Since I paint photorealistically, it makes or breaks a portrait. If I leave it in, the likeness is not there. And in a face we are talking about as little as one millimetre, and it is not the subject in the photo any more.
What do people most often get wrong about their own face when they finally see it painted?
I cannot answer that as a painter, because of the people I choose to paint, celebrities and so on. But as I am also a portrait photographer, working in exactly the same way as a painter, looking to capture what is inside and not just the face itself, I would say that they hardly recognise themselves. Why? Because they are relaxed, the masks they wear are gone, and all that is left is them. That is why my portrait models very seldom look directly into the camera until the end of a session, because that is when they are most relaxed and simply their true self.
Have you ever been painted or drawn by someone else, and how was it being on the other side?
Painted, no, never. But I have been on the other side of the camera. And it is a strange feeling, just because I do not view myself the way they do. That really puts a finger on this subject, and it is what makes it such a captivating one.
Which of your portraits took longest to finish in your own head, long after the paint was dry?
That is a really hard question. I would say none, because when I finish a portrait it is finished and I do not dwell on it. For me the process is the other way around. It takes a long time for me to work out how to do justice to the person I choose to paint. My job as a portrait painter is not to make a copy of a photograph. It is to make the person come alive and show who he or she is behind the face. That takes more time than the painting itself.
Two things in these answers are worth sitting with.
The first is the millimetre. Szabó works photorealistically, so she can measure the distance between a likeness and a stranger, and it turns out to be about a millimetre. That is a useful number for anyone who thinks appearance is vague and subjective. It is not vague at all. It is a set of relations so precise that the eye catches an error nobody could name.
The second is what happens when the camera is left running.
Her sitters do not look into the lens until the end, because that is the point at which they stop performing. And when they see the result, they barely recognise themselves. Which means the face we recognise as our own is the arranged one, the one we assemble for an audience. The one other people find most convincing is the one we never see.
Sources: Instagram @portrait_painter_monieszabo