How I Approach a Portrait

How I Approach a Portrait: Notes on Self-Taught Figurative Work I'm often asked how I learned to paint and draw, and the honest answer is: mostly by doing it wrong first. I'm a self-taught artist working in oil, charcoal, pastel and pencil from County Carlow, Ireland, and almost everything I know about portraiture came from sitting with a subject, getting it wrong, and figuring out why. Why faces Figurative work and portraiture pull me in because a face is never really still. Even in a single sitting, someone's expression drifts through a dozen small variations — a tightening around the eyes, a shift in the set of the mouth — and most of them never make it into a photograph. What I'm chasing, in charcoal as much as in oil, is one of those in-between moments: not a pose, but something closer to a thought caught mid-motion. That's also why I don't work toward a single "correct" likeness. A good portrait, to me, holds a bit of ambiguity — enough that the viewer has to look twice and decide for themselves what the person in it is thinking. I want the work to create a little wonder, a little inquisition, rather than settle everything for the viewer in one glance. Medium changes the question Each medium asks something different of a portrait. Oil is patient. It lets me build up flesh tones in thin layers, correct as I go, and take my time with the transitions in skin that make a face read as alive rather than flat. It's usually where I take a subject when I want the finished piece to feel weighty and considered. Charcoal is the opposite: immediate and a little forgiving in a different way — you can push tone around, lift it back out, keep the drawing loose right up until the last pass. I reach for it when I want the energy of the first marks to survive into the finished piece, gesture and all. Pastel sits somewhere between the two — it has the color range of paint but a directness closer to drawing — and pencil is where I go to strip a portrait down to almost nothing: just line, weight, and the handful of marks that make a likeness read as a specific person rather than a generic face. What stays the same regardless of medium, the process starts the same way: close, patient observation before a single mark goes down. I'm looking for the handful of structural relationships — where the eyes sit relative to the ears, how the light falls across the planes of the face — that will hold the whole drawing or painting together once I start adding detail. Get that scaffolding wrong and no amount of surface polish fixes it later. From there it's a slow build: block in the large tonal masses first, then work steadily into the smaller passages where expression actually lives — the corners of the eyes, the set of the mouth, the small asymmetries that make a face someone's face rather than anyone's face. Commissions If you're interested in a portrait — of yourself, a family member, or someone you'd like to see rendered in oil, charcoal, pastel or pencil — I take on a limited number of commissions each year. Feel free to get in touch with a photo or two and a sense of what you have in mind, and we can talk through medium, size, and timeline.