Painting people she knows
Janet Kimantas relishes the challenges of portraiture Art
“I like smearing paint on surfaces, and I just really hope that people find the results worthwhile,” says Janet Kimantas.
These might sound like the words of an experienced abstractionist painter, but Kimantas works in a lifelike style, painting a variety of subjects. For Look Again: Another Take on the Portrait, an exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery, the Hamilton artist embraced portraiture.
Portraiture is a genre that requires a likeness and demands the artist respect that.
“The painted portrait presents particular challenges that are extremely satisfying to tackle,” Kimantas tells me. “The challenges include simultaneously registering a likeness, portraying a believable human figure existing in three-dimensional space, expressing an emotion or state of mind, and creating an engaging and relevant work of art.”
Painting portraits is not new for Kimantas, an OCAD University graduate. But size now matters.
“The large variation in scale is new,” she says. “I’ve never strayed far from life-size prior to this work and I’m finding the unique challenges of both the very large and the small, tightly cropped renditions a lot of fun.”
Kimantas offers four portraits and one self-portrait. Each of the four comprises an over-life-size version executed in a lifelike style and several smaller ones, some sketchier than others.
“These portraits were conceived and executed over considerable periods of time,” Kimantas explains.
“The models might have gone through a personal crisis and recovered while I was completing the work, may have moved across the country for a career change or gotten a new tattoo. More than one of these people went through health issues. One of them got married.
“I’ve tried to convey the passage of time and the many aspects and emotions that make up a human life.”
A portrait records the relationship between the painter and the sitter, then aims to establish a relationship between the sitter and the viewer. Kimantas says she knows her sitters well. Two of them — Daniel and Kestrel — are her children.
“The third is a colleague and the fourth is a professional model who also is a colleague. These are people whose lives I know something about, people I’ve spent considerable time with.”
In “Kestrel I: Pensive,” the over-lifesize version, Kimantas places her daughter in the centre of the composition, letting her dominate the space.
But part of a table in the foreground creates a barrier between her and the viewer. This type of barrier is a traditional way of preventing the viewer from rushing into the painting.
Kestrel, wearing a knitted headband, rests her elbows on the table. She avoids the viewer’s gaze, looking rightward at something beyond the picture space.
In another over-life-size portrait, “Robyn I: Complexity,” Kimantas paints her model head to waist. Her pose is ambiguous. Robyn looks at the viewer, seeming to invite the viewer’s gaze. But she holds her arms up in front of her body, her right hand clasped firmly on her left wrist as though shielding herself.
Kimantas places Robyn to the left of centre, leaving a space on the right. In a big painting like this, the space competes for attention.
In her “Self-Portrait,” Kimantas holds her hand to her chin in a traditional gesture of thought. Her portrait is more intimate than the others since she appears closer to us because all we see is her face and a bit of her body.
In a self-portrait, artist and sitter are one. We look at someone looking at themselves.
“The self-portrait was painted from both photographic reference and from life,” Kimantas says. “The head owes itself to photography and the expression to great concentration.”