FOREWORD TO THE ARTIST AS A PORTRAIT (MARCH 2000)

...stepped back like an artist gazing amazed

at a work that points at him amazed. (Ted Hughes)

Portraiture in its widest sense conveys, sometimes only subconsciously betrays, the personality as well as the person. Messages about people are projected and perceived on different levels and by different media; they can all be involved in the business of portrayal.

The face, the hand and the mind are three ways in which we reveal ourselves, or are revealed. All are actively engaged in this catalogue.

There is an art (or is it an artlessness?) to find the mind's construction in the face, and while portraits can capture something about the conscious or indeed even the unconscious mind, they can also tell us about the artistic and psychological transaction; about emotions, sensations, the period of time. That penetration acquires a particular power when the artist is the portrait, either in the act of self-depiction or when being portrayed by one of his peers, and is, of course, revelatory of both the painter and the painted.

The analysis of writing may be no more of a science than physiognomy, but, as with the myriad messages we receive on looking at a person or a portrait, writing is a pictograph of the man. Its physical presence on the paper represents him; it seems to bear as well as to be his mark. It usually presents him sallying forth, putting his best foot forward, but drafts, like preliminary drawings, wonderfully transfix the process of creation, and its freshness. For those able to be touched by such things, manuscripts retain much of the writer's aura and magic.

In using letters to express his mind, the person writing employs the first alternative to speech. Letters reflect the personality, can catch the cadence of a voice, can even sometimes register an accent (I well remember the pleasure of 'Duplyn' in a seventeenth-century document; also Yeats's letters). The contact between individuals that letters preserve makes them the most human form of history.

Let us not forget, too, that portraits are pictures, pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the imagination; they are one of Man's archetypal subjects - himself; they are fine examples of media and technique; in a real sense they too are conceptual and documentary. And although letters and manuscripts really are relics, holy in their way, they also carry the cargo of a man's life.

This catalogue celebrates a cast of painters, sculptors, photographers, and print-makers et alii through their lives, likenesses, letters, manuscripts and minds.

Its effect would be greatest were it to give currency to an interpretation of droit de suite that resulted in portraits of artists, and perhaps their letters as well, finding a place in galleries and collections alongside their creative works.

Roy Davids