Portrait of Chris Grieb:

[Victor]

Portrait of Chris Grieb: Capturing a benevolent soul in caricature.

By Victor Pross

You know, I think I may very well be the only caricaturist who has a “philosophy of caricature.” I’m serious. Thanks to Rand, I practice a certain epistemology even towards this underrated art form. I searched my mind and identified the art’s essential characteristics, and the results can be seen in the art.

Let me explain what I mean. When it comes to caricaturing, it is the person’s “inside” that interests me. This is where you find the heart in the art form. I come across inspired artists who are interested in exploring caricature and who often proceed to capriciously plunge in with little or no understanding of the art form. As a result, one will witness drawing after drawing of enlarged noses, lips, ears, foreheads, eyes, chins and heads—all the variable caricature clichés. Too often I see interchangeable drawings from different artists who bend themselves out of shape in the attempt to bend their subject out of shape, as if caricature was nothing more than enlarging and distorting every extremity. It all becomes so boring.

After much trial and error, I discovered the main idea is to capture the soul of your subject. This is much more important than merely distorting features or resorting to exhausted formula, no matter how well one may draw. Like a shallow aging narcissistic model, too many caricaturists are obsessed with the “outside” at the expense of the “inside” of their subjects. Now when I say “capturing the soul” of the subject, I find that a quote from Leonardo da Vinci very instructive to communicate my meaning:

“Faces display in part the nature of men, their vices and temperaments.”

With this quote in mind, I set out to capture my subject’s “nature and temperament.” In other words, I seek to capture their souls. There is much more to caricature than capturing features. It’s also about capturing the subtle (or not so subtle) nuances of a person—little highly individual touches that breathe life into the work.

I was once asked why I didn’t stretch Chris’s smile ear to ear in the caricature seen here. I very well could have made Chris’s mouth stretch ear to ear, but I decided not to and for a reason. As a general rule—and strictly speaking in terms of physiognomy—a caricature artist should not make everything BIG. In fact, he should deliberately make some of the features smaller (depending on the subject). It is the contrast of big and small that makes a striking caricature. If you make everything BIG—like big nose, big ears, big smile, big head, big eyes, etc, you no longer have a caricature. You simply have a big drawing. In this portrait of my friend Chris, you can see the man’s playful, child-like benevolence. That was my aim. I believe I succeeded.

**

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c242/obj...oss/Chris-1.jpg

Edited June 1, 2007 by Victor