ON AGING — 3

The Maggie Smith Effect
by SGHolland

It’s been a little over a year since I stopped working on this. I’ve aged since, of course.

Now and then in the studio I have an itch to take a good look at myself, the artist. I’ve painted a lot of self portraits since the days of art school. At Tyler there were always models, and students did portraits of each other as well. But at home I was the only available model, and the mirror was where I sat.

Some early sketches from some decades ago.

Aging makes self-portraiture something more than posing a person and telling the truth. This is telling the truth about YOU.

Sometimes a glass or more of wine makes one turn off one’s left brain. This is from long ago in the winey days.

The person and the artist have a close relationship and it’s very tricky how the left brain kicks in and interrupts the right brain during such a project. (See Painting on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards’ book.)

Yes, rearranging the lighting can make even an old person look worse or better, but there are so few “better” compared to “worse.”

More than that, the model, in this case, is a person who is concentrating intently on what she is doing, and therefore may do things like wrinkling her nose, or squinting, or scrooching up her mouth. And she may tire after a while and change the pose! (even professional models do that — therefore we give them breaks. And we give them money! This does not happen at home.)

I decided to look for truth, not “effect” in my “Maggie Smith” self-portrait. After all that old lady in Downton Abbey is dignified, respected, even feared!, She is polite, and proper without losing her zing.

I keep getting a glimpse of my self portrait (still stopped in mid-creation because I like what I have caught and find it therapeutic) and thinking — ”that IS you, Susan, face it. In fact it’s a sort of likable you, Susan, even though you look like a prune.”

Getting to know oneself as an aging person is nearly a daily adventure. Things begin changing fast sometimes. Then, as the same step-forward-step-back journey through adolescence does, there may be a temporary reversion to a younger you, and then suddenly there you are at your real age again. No concealer can fake it anymore.

And so, the large adults who were once your children look at you and automatically take your arm when going up and down steps or getting into the car. Hmm. They see what they see and they suspect dodderiness. Well, Maggie Smith never gets upset about that sort of thing! She and her cane and her entourage can go with dignity and grace anywhere she chooses and she doesn’t worry about it.

Truth

I took a couple of photos of myself in the mirror yesterday (or was it the day before?) and was appalled at what I saw when I brought them up in the computer. It took a lot of doctoring to make that old woman look like something nicer than a wraith! Blurs and “noise” and tinkering with the contrast. The photos should now be brought way down in size to reduce the wrinkles that I hate even though I earned them.

I earned those wrinkles, and some of them are also due to changes in my skeletal frame — loss of bone and a few teeth — and skin getting very thin and transparent. I’m nearly 80. So there it is in pixels and paint, and I am still working on it!

Like the painting in the archives, the flesh and blood face stays the same until I do more to it, like getting a day older.

SGHolland 2017 , art, photography and text all ©SGHolland 2017 all rights reserved.