I recently received an email from an excessively angry person . . .  I did not know her or had ever met her. . .  She wasn’t angry at anyone in particular. She was just angry and in need of a scapegoat upon which she could lay her wrath.

How wonderful it would have been to paint that aggressive face,  to just get to know the deep-down-inside menace controlling the muscle spasms of her venomous tongue, to paint the weight of the sneering furrowed brow. Despite not having a webcam, I knew there were those eyes – eyes with a carefully honed piercing stare, whose only goal was to rip from me the smile I had worked on all day.

The challenge in portraiture is not so much the rendering of the petrified face but rather the capture of tone and mood and history – the present and future. . . The focus in portraiture is on the ferreting out of every powerful emotion which lies hidden and pulsing and ready to spring forth -  either to terrorize or gently caress.

In essence, what is more important than a smile or frown in a face is the secret fears or hates or love behind them. And that makes a portrait a portrait. . .