Portrait painting

  Portrait painting is an art which many would-be paint­ers would like to tackle, whether they be amateurs or beginning students with professional aspirations. This is but natural, for a majority of us are far more interested in people than in landscape or baskets of fruit, and we prefer to paint the subjects which appeal to us the most. One can get a real thrill from creating on canvas a color­ful likeness of his mother, his Uncle John, or his sweet­heart across the street. And these sitters can share in the painter's enthusiasm; they are participants in his exciting pictorial adventures. Sales may be made, also, to inflate the painter's ego as well as his wallet; they may even lead to a lucrative and satisfying professional career.

  All too often, however, beginners deliberately stifle their bent in this direction, not from choice but under the mistaken impression that to produce satisfactory portraits is prohibitively difficult—that to be successful one needs some unusual kind or degree of talent. Even without giving portraiture a fair trial, they therefore turn to other subjects mainly because they believe that these subjects lie more within their capacities.

  These qualms about portraiture are as unfortunate as they are unfounded. The fact is—as proven again and again—that any beginner possessing even a modicum of inborn ability is soon able, once he has cleared the first hurdles, to produce portraits of acceptable quality. A surprisingly large number of those who work with perseverance eventually turn out superlative work.