City Art Centre
After my visit to the Edinburgh Modern Art Gallery, then stopping off to view St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, I headed for the City Art Centre in Market Street just off Waverley Station. This site is dedicated to Scottish visual and applied arts, past and present. Pieces from the Scottish art collection are displayed on rotation, with exhibitions of both painting, photography, and contemporary art and craft featured throughout the year.
I managed to catch Unmasked: Exploring Scottish Portraiture. This exhibition covers almost 400 years of art, featuring historical pieces by, for example, George Jameson and Henry Raeburn through to contemporary work by Flannery O’kafka and Sekai Machache.
Portraiture has been around for a long time, way before the age of selfies and I did view this collection at times through the prism of the modern obsession of taking selfies and putting them up on social media. Recording the likeness of a person through art raises questions of context, about the relationship between the artist and the sitter, and how the situation came about. Some portraits are official, commissioned to mark an achievement or the life of the sitter. Others of course may have been painted by artists who have never met the individual. We also have self-portraits, which is yet another area to consider. I noted from the exhibition notes, that ‘in all its forms, portraiture raises questions about agency, authenticity and intention.’ Again, I could not help but apply this to the modern practice of taking selfies and the ability to use technology to filter and alter the image to suit a particular view or narrative. Of course, this practice of altering details and including backgrounds and imagery into portraits is nothing new. The artist interprets the sitter, and this can be based on an agreed brief, or purely on the mind of the artist. A portrait may provide some insight into the private life of the sitter, or raise or deflect questions, much the same way a modern selfie can.
Does the act of someone else taking the photograph of a sitter, provide a more valid, more revealing aspect of the sitter’s personality, than the sitter taking a selfie and doctoring it themselves? I leave this for you to make your own mind up.