Continuing with my exploration of the face’s terrain in color, with this portrait I wanted to capture Rob Rinder's lively mind, thoughtful and thought-full, as I participated in Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Week's livestream of former winner Gareth Reid as he sketched in charcoal the TV personality and UK barrister.  I felt as if I had received a gift being able to listen in on Gareth and Rob as each described their own creative processes, pushing each other for deeper understanding, finding kind humility in both. What lingered while I put brush to canvas this week was Rob’s deep listening as he pondered the concept of preconceived knowledge that Gareth had described of how many art students are not able to achieve a good likeness because they have fixed ideas of what an eye is, a mouth, a nose, and how that affects one's approach to seeing a face (and--I thought--our understanding of so many things in life).  It was a reminder that what we truly need to “see" is what Zen describes as “beginner’s mind."  

We are so bombarded with imagery today (TV, internet, smart phones, etc.), addicted to looking at things and human beings.  We've become numb to the immensity of it all, and paradoxically we "see" less.  Returning to our original source, our child's eye, our beginner's mind, is where we begin to discover again the truth of what it is we are looking at.  When we look as if we've never seen something before, now that eye is not something named "eye" with all our locked-in ideas about what that is, but a shape, light, dark, color, relative to something else next to it that we are seeing anew.   We want to try to go beyond the condition of non-seeing, of no longer seeing.  Not only does this help with achieving a likeness, it also brings a freshness to the process as a creator.  Maybe the artist does not even want a likeness, but now can "see" the object that we term "eye" as something else, spurring innovation.  

So I attempted to carry that spirit in my rendering of Rob Rinder's portrait, hopefully bringing a freshness, a new "look" to what we think of as portraiture.