“The painter expresses himself by presenting the visible world, the portraitist must show the invisible – the personality of a model.
“The meaning of art”, Herbert Read
Portrait painting is a difficult field, to a certain extent, it is the applied art. For centuries portraits have been ordered not only to preserve the look of the model, but, above all, to create a definite image of a person being portrayed and to impose such an image on the contemporary and posterity. The reasons why a given person ordered the portrait had a great influence on the form of the image. On the other hand, when the impulse to create a portrait does not come from the model himself, it flows from the fascination of the painter with the person portrayed. Then a painter has to discipline emotions, because it is easy to exaggerate and glorify the idol, but there is no temptation to flatter the taste of the model.
Laura La Wasilewska, while creating a series of images of artists whose works impressed her, set herself this difficult target- but she did her job well. She avoided painting panegyrics dedicated to the icons of contemporary art, but she created the portraits of living people captured in their daily poses. The artist moved her models into the world of their paintings, making them actors of reality that they painted or she showed them during their work, surrounded by paintings or sculptures in the interior. Surrounded by the atelier, with paintings, easel or palette, she portrayed: Leonor Fini, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, among paintings or sculptures: Georgia O’Keeffe, Neo Rauch, Francis Starowieyski, Igor Mitoraj.
Renata Higersberger
