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Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
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In late summer, Anne Rowe flew out to Tucson, Ariz., to meet her new subject, a friend’s granddaughter. They spent several days together, lunched, drank wine, went to a spa, talked about yoga—which the young woman teaches—and combed through her closet. Mrs. Rowe took more than 100 photographs; nobody in our crazy-fast world can stay still long enough to sit for a portrait.
Back in her Central West End studio, she knew immediately which pose she wanted: the one on the window seat with natural light, the young woman relaxed, her eyes thoughtful. She was wearing a long, clingy plum dress from Target. The good family
jewelry, Mrs. Rowe would add last, once everything else was right.
“A portrait is about capturing a moment in time,” she explains as she works. “You’re telling the truth, but more than that.” What she’s seeking is her subject’s essence. More than any other genre, portraiture fulfills the tribal fear that a photograph steals someone’s soul. But in a painting, the artist gives it back, framed.
Mrs. Rowe pulls out another portrait, and in this one, the subject—a 7-year-old boy—is staring straight at you, mischief in his cornflower-blue eyes. His nose is snub, his chin bears a devilish dimple, and you know immediately, he’ll have an interesting life. “I did it over, and then I did that one over, and finally I got it,” she recalls. “I called his mother over, and she said, ‘Yes, that’s my son!’ It was the expression in the eyes.”
Portraiture largely vanished as photography ascended, but it returned in playful ways in the 1970s. Now people are beginning to commission traditional portraits again. Mrs. Rowe’s foundation is the line drawing—if that’s not correct, all the color in the world won’t bring the person to life. As she begins to lay in the color, she uses tiny tricks (looking at the canvas with a mirror jolts your assumptions, for instance, giving you another perspective, so you can see any problems with proportion or symmetry). But mainly, she strives for fidelity: to the individual, and to a single, fleeting moment in his or her life that will now last for centuries.
For that reason, although Mrs. Rowe often works in other media, she does all of her portraits in oil. “An oil on linen canvas is going to outlast me, it’s going to outlast the sitter, it’s going to outlast all of us,” she explains. “That’s why portraits are so hard.”
Portrait photography is faster, more accessible, and easier to redo. But over time, a photograph will fade. “There’s no reproduced color that’s going to last as long as paints do,” Mrs. Rowe says. “And a photograph is still a flat, flat, flat surface. You are not aware of anybody’s hand having anything to do with it. You don’t see brush strokes; you don’t sense the human touch.
“The camera doesn’t think, and I do.”
