John Dowie part two

The appearance of a person lies not in the little details, the tilt of a nose or something of that sort, but basically in large proportions. Everybody knows that you can recognise somebody at a very great distance. You think yourself, how if you were walking along a beach, you could see friends coming anything up to a quarter of a mile away, and furthermore recognise them quite clearly at that distance, although their face at that distance would be nothing more than a pink smudge, so that any question of proportions of nose and eyes and colour of lips or whatever it might be, just simply doesn’t enter into it. The poise, the characteristic way of walking, the proportion of head to face and all that sort of thing, all enter into your powers of recognising somebody at that distance. And it’s that sort of proportion, rhythmic relationships and such that you must seek to start with. The likeness actually starts in the very first strokes, the very first masses of clay that are put on, are seeking this rhythmic and proportional element of the head that you are portraying. Then by progressive steps all the lesser elements are treated in the same way, not only for themselves but in relation to each other and to the whole, and that complex of tensions and relations are the things which underlie successful portraiture and, indeed, any other form of visual art.