Dad didn’t do a lot of portraits over the course of his career (which is a shame). At some point he did say, though, that the best portraits said it all with the eyes. “The eyes have it,” was how he then summarized his point whenever he’d comment on a piece of work that managed to capture the essence of the subject by a particularly good eye capture.
The one person he did draw over the years was himself. “I can be totally honest when I do a self-portrait,” he said. “Who’s going to be offended?”
What’s most striking about many of these works, some finished, some not, are his eyes. They were large, blue, and distinctive and all his self-portraits do a fine job of capturing them.
In his later years when he realized he was losing his vision - two cataract surgeries and treatment for glaucoma didn’t help when he also suffered a small stroke in one eye, drastically reducing his vision and really messing with his depth perception. As his eyesight grew worse, he relied heavily on bright lights and magnifying lenses of various kinds to enable him to keep working.
He completed several powerful self-portraits in his last few years, most of which are actually quite hard to be around - the direct, serious stare really does follow one around the room…
The one he’s holding up in the photo is not quite finished, though I believe he did complete it eventually. I had him put on the mock-serious face for the sake of the photograph (taken about a year before he passed away). There are more, but I’ll leave this topic for now - I’m not sure how much of my dad’s staring is fair to impose upon you in one go.
Dad did have sense of humour and liked to draw cartoons for fun. It seems appropriate to conclude with this one before I wrap up for today…
(And, yes, as a kind reader suggested, as I struggle to find a way to quickly capture the essence of my father in my own drawings, a good place to start is with his eyes…)