Art and Lines
4 minute read
If you watch Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, you’ll know that the least popular sitters are beautiful young women. Not from a personality point of view, of course, but from the perspective of creating great portraiture. The show’s contestants become most excited when they’re presented with an ageing rock star, a character actor or veteran personality – those whose life experiences are unapologetically etched across every feature of their faces.
I’ve learned from watching the show that portrait artists aren’t simply looking for a surface likeness, they’re searching for something deeper – a signature trait, a suggestion of biography, a trigger of identity – and that’s found through the idiosyncratic furrows and folds on each individual’s face, as well as the expressions they give rise to. Cracks and crevices are the pathway to a person’s soul it seems, but smooth skin reveals little of what lies beneath.
In one particular episode, there was a little girl among the viewers present on the day, drawing some of the sitters on sheets of paper laid out on the floor. When judge Ty Shan Schierenberg asked her who she most liked drawing, she pointed to 71-year-old actress Harriet Walter. When Schierenberg asked why, the girl replied it was because of all the lines on Walter’s face. In the world of portraiture, wrinkles and lines are a wonderful thing, relished and respected. In the world of fashion, beauty and entertainment, however, they’re reviled and rejected.
Context is everything isn’t it. I wonder if American actor and author Justine Bateman would have been so heavily criticised on social media for how she looks if she worked in the art world rather than in Hollywood? The 53-year-old, who you’ll most likely recognise from 80s sitcom Family Ties – she’s also the sister of actor Jason Bateman – looks like any number of 50-somethings I know.
She’s had no cosmetic procedures, so her skin has texture, her forehead is creased, her eyes are framed by feathery lines and her mouth defined by laughter lines. So far, so normal.
Yet the mother of two has been described by internet trolls as looking “horrible now”, with one of them even comparing her face to that of a crack addict’s. As a result, in 2021, Bateman wrote Face: One Square Foot of Skin, in order to explore the “imagined reality that older women’s faces” are “unattractive, undesirable, and something to be ‘fixed’”.
In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, she made a couple of comments that really resonated with me. She maintains that from a young age many children are taught to be critical of ageing faces. Bateman explains: “When I was younger, I don’t remember being repulsed or taken aback or needing to adjust my perception of a person if they had an older face”...neither did that young girl on Portrait Artist of the Year. Neither did I as a child – or you I suspect – when I looked at my grandparents’ faces or older women on TV, of which there were more in the 80s and 90s. Cilla Black remained the presenter of Blind Date until the age of 60 when the programme came off air in 2003.
So what happens to a woman’s psyche between the ages of about seven and 37 – the average age of women looking for facial surgery these days (down from 39 in 2017), according to a 2019 study conducted by a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon and reported in Harper’s Bazaar. How does a little girl who loves drawing lines on faces grow up to eventually want to erase them so vociferously? The answer is a combination of scaremongering (if you look ‘old’, nobody will want to employ or date you; nobody will listen to or respect you), misinformation (have Botox when you’re young and it will prevent lines and wrinkles forming – no it won’t) and the lack of visibility of older women in the media over the past 20 years, or at least those who look older.
Bateman suggests this has resulted in “a real fear women have that is irrationally attached to the skin on their face”. This feels true. I was told by a dermatologist once that I have a very pronounced frown line, which of course Botox could ‘fix’. I wasn’t aware of this ‘problem’ because I don’t spend much time frowning at myself in the mirror, and I couldn’t think of any good reason to regularly freeze my frown line other than opinions outside of my own, which didn’t seem like any sort of reason at all. In her book, Bateman touches on the intense pressure women in Hollywood feel to kowtow to what they think others want them to look like.
Bateman also makes the point that: “I’ve not found [a] level of confidence oozing from the pores of women who’ve had a lot of plastic surgery. It’s just not been my experience.”
Another truism if you watch Love island at least (I have diverse tastes in TV). It’s often the girls who’ve had the most plastic surgery who are the most insecure (Faye in last season’s show and Ekin-Su in the current season).
In her book, Bateman also talks about the actors she looked up to as a young woman – Jeanne Moreau, Charlotte Rampling and Anna Magnani. “I longed for Jeanne Moreau’s under-eye bags, Charlotte Rampling’s sharp cheekbones and hooded eyelids, and Anna Magnani’s deep and dark creases extending down from the inner corners of her eyes. When I look at these women, the thing that shines through for me is their confidence. And so for me, in my 20s, that’s what I wanted – that confidence.”
What a refreshing sentiment, and one I think a lot of women will relate to despite the persistent narrative that youth is sexy and perfection is beautiful. Any one of these women would have made an incredible sitter on Portrait Artist, as would Bateman. And if I was ever to have my portrait painted, I’d like the artist to feel inspired and energised not indifferent, wouldn’t you?
Marie Kelly, July 2022
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