How Do People See People?

Three Louisiana artists share their perspectives on portraiture

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Portraiture remains one of the most recognizable and accessible forms of visual art; depictions of figure and face, even when abstracted, are easily identifiable without artistic training. Since time immemorial, artists have imagined the human form, striving to capture how eyes, lips, and noses create harmony or disruption, how truth can be found in both representational creations and fragmented realities. For our Visual Arts issue, we asked three Louisiana-based artists working in different mediums how they approach portraiture—how they see and (re)create the people they encounter—and what this reveals about our shared humanity.  

Aron Belka, oils

DIALOGUE AND DISRUPTION 

Aron Belka’s portraits, many standing several feet tall, demand confrontation. His subjects are working class, man-on-the-street, traditionally passed over by society—no one widely known. This is deliberate, the canvas a pedestal of sorts. 

“I always wanted to paint large,” Belka said. “It also tied into these subjects that I chose, these people who were going unnoticed. If you walk by a painting that large, you're definitely going to notice it.”

Inspired by contemporary English painter Jenny Saville, who is known for depicting the human form at a massive, monumental scale, Belka developed his own approach to portraiture. 

“The amount of pictorial competition and incessant scrolling that we have now, because of the emergence of handheld devices and things like that, it leaves little time to invest in a singular moment,” Belka said. “So, that sort of has driven some of the style of my work, and actually the style in other people's work that I like—’disrupted realism,’ I guess. It's almost like distorting traditional realism to reflect that fragmentation of modern life.” 

In 2015, he presented his first solo exhibition at New Orleans's LeMieux Galleries titled Working the Wetlands. Along with landscapes, Belka portrayed people who labored in Louisiana's coastal marshes, most rendered on gigantic canvases against largely abstract backgrounds.  

Since then, Belka has launched other people-focused projects; some of his work illustrates time spent in Ireland during two residencies, others explore different snippets of Louisiana life. He has painted Sierra Leoneans affected by the Ebola epidemic, as well as his then-wife, a field epidemiologist at the frontlines of the outbreak, in addition to creatives in the New Orleans area, many of them friends. 

Though he often paints on commission, Belka also selects subjects when he is drawn to their appearance or story. One striking portrait titled “Seosamh, a chara,” from his 2022 exhibition at LeMieux titled Kelp and Potatoes, depicts an Irish peat farmer who would deliver logs to Belka’s cottage during his residency in Ballinskelligs. Belka knew when he first met the man he wanted to paint him, though it took him several weeks to develop enough of a rapport to ask permission to photograph the farmer for a painting. The man’s ruddy, lined face is one of Belka’s most vivid portraits. 

As part of his process, Belka tries to photograph his subjects mid-conversation so he can capture them at their most natural and relaxed. Afterward, he begins the portrait sometimes with a sketch, other times with large shapes and color as he maps out the face. His tools include brushes (occasionally quite large ones), rollers, palette knives, squeegees, and scrapers to achieve the diversity of marks and texture characteristic of his work.  

“Each painting is almost like a dialogue,” Belka said. “When you get into it, you're kind of having this dialogue, and sometimes you have to take it in a different direction. Sometimes the painting is really fighting you, and it's just a lot more difficult. Sometimes it goes very easily, and just seems to flow.”

His paintings rely on disruption, often composed of several layers and sections in varying stages of development, to produce a fragmented appearance. He will pull paint from the background into the subject (and vice versa) or leave portions of an abstract underlayer visible in a finished piece. Viewing his larger, more imposing portraits up close is an experience in abstraction, the markings loose and unrecognizable; it is only when one steps back that the image takes on shape and meaning, the textures and brushstrokes deliberate. aronbelka.com.

John Alleyne, silkscreen-collage

THE ROOTS OF BELONGING 

While manning the membership sales desk at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, John Alleyne often admired Andy Warhol’s colorful screen prints on display—though he noticed he did not see many inspiring images of Black or Brown people in Warhol’s oeuvre. Years later, working on his MFA at LSU and learning the art of screen printing, Alleyne set out to fill that gap—representing the Black icons of his home country of Barbados and his American homes of Brooklyn and Baton Rouge.  

 When he first arrived in Brooklyn from Barbados in his teens, Alleyne was homesick and experiencing culture shock, yearning for the communal spaces of his youth and the people who populated them. He found one of the antidotes to his nostalgia in the barbershop and the hair salon—a “space of sanctuary.” 

“I'm really inspired by hairstyle-guide posters and the portraits,” said Alleyne, who has frequently turned to hair as a pattern-making tool in his art. “You know, these different portraits of the different numbers of like, one through thirty or one through twenty, of just these different hair styles that you can embody.”

Those images have become an integral part of Alleyne’s artistic process; in his prints, he sources pieces from the posters—an eye or a nose, for example—which he collages and prints with self-portraits of his own hair. The results are abstract images drawing on his roots of belonging. Alternately, the use of negative space in his work, along with pieced-together abstractions of his portraits, grapples with Alleyne’s teenage desire to find camouflage as a young immigrant in a new country, a visual expression of his deportation fears. 

As an artist, Alleyne exists in a liminal space between a printmaker and a painter, labeling himself something of an abstract expressionist. He creates all his own prints manually and often lays his printing surface on the floor for a wider range of motion. In addition to using layers to create his signature collage effect, he also has multiple screens going at a time. His process deviates from traditional printmaking insofar as he focuses on a “fluid, gestural quality” in his prints (no hinges or registration marks, tools that usually allow for more precise placement with clear, consistent results).

“I'm looking for the imperfect print. And printmakers are, for the most part, interested in looking for something that's, you know, like the perfect print, something that's exact,” Alleyne said. “I think there's an energy that I am trying to make in my work that I'm only able to achieve through the use of ghost printing.” Ghost printing refers to the doubled, often faint copy of an image that appears on a page or surface during printmaking, and is generally considered a print quality issue. “Ghost printing is something I would say not every print maker is looking for—if anything, it's kind of like an accident; basically, printmakers don't use it as a technique. They want clean, sharp images as they print onto a surface. But there's this hazy tint that it kind of creates—like this atmosphere that I really enjoy in my work.” 

One of Alleyne’s most recent projects interrogates how Black hair—dreadlocks in particular—can be understood and imagined as armor to protect the Black body, from threats ranging from the weather to police brutality. “So Afro-futurism,” Alleyne explained. “Thinking about the future, thinking about what Black people can potentially become, and our aesthetic, and just using hair as a shield to protect oneself.”

The boldness of his work, often monochromatic with occasional pops of color, extends to his use of models in his portraits. He seeks faces that are unashamed to stare back at the viewer, those willing to bare their souls to the camera. 

“I'm looking for this captivating eye contact that is not intimidated, it’s not afraid,” he said. “It's basically saying, ‘Here I am, and I'm proud of my image. I'm proud of my aesthetic.’" johnalleyne.com.

Janet Maines, graphite/charcoal artist

START WITH THE EYES

Janet Maines stumbled into portraiture about a decade ago—through the doors of a garage apartment. 

Maines was, and remains, a graphic designer by trade, and only “piddled around” with drawing, by her own admission, for most of her life. But browsing Facebook one day, she was captivated by several charcoal life drawings an art teacher from her college days posted regularly. He kept referring to a class where he made these sketches, and she finally mustered the courage to ask him more about it.

As it turned out, the “class” consisted of three seasoned artists who gathered in a garage apartment to do figure drawing with a model in a chair. There was no instruction, and not enough space to invite anyone else to participate, she was told. She was welcome to watch. 

“So, I went one week, and in the last thirty minutes or so, they thrust the drawing pad and a pencil in my lap and said, ‘Okay, here, you draw her too,’” Maines recalled. “And I was so intimidated, because one of the men had studied in Paris, and, I mean, you know, they were real artists. And so, I tried to draw the best that I could, which was horrible, and I cried all the way home … and I thought, ‘Well, at least they don't have room for me, so that torturous situation will be the last.’”

Instead, the owner of the apartment moved furniture out of the space so the group could make room for Maines who, now obligated, began attending the class regularly. Soon, with pointers from her colleagues, along with rigorous study of contemporary artists she admired online, Maines found both her confidence and a new passion. 

“Within a couple of months of drawing, I just really liked the face, so I was doing head and shoulders,” she said. “I started getting commissions, and I just started drawing more regularly than I ever had before.” 

The timing was serendipitous. During the pandemic, Maines’ graphic design work slowed—while her portrait commissions ramped up, along with interest in a drawing class she started offering on Zoom.  

Now she regularly takes commissions and teaches. For portraiture, she prefers pencil over charcoal—graphite allows her slightly more control, though she enjoys using charcoal for looser, more creative pieces. Some portraits have stayed with her—for instance, one of a former high school art teacher, who has a magnificent beard cascading down his chest; another of a little boy in a dinosaur raincoat who had died from a chronic illness. 

Maines largely works from photographs, which she uses as a reference while drawing. She begins with an overall sketch of the face, head, and shoulders before putting in small details.

“I usually start with the eyes … but I kind of work a little bit on this area, and then I notice, you know, a little dimple over here, and I'll work a little bit on that, and kind of skip back and forth,” she said. “Each feature and every bit of shading in a portrait, it's all relative.”

Often, she will place her portrait-in-progress beside the reference photo to make sure she’s catching the most minute characteristics that make the image come alive. For Maines, paying close attention to the responsive nature of the face can bring a portrait into conversation with the viewer. Signifiers of emotional response—the twinkle or spark in the eyes, the suggestion of a smile—are critical to animating her portraits. 

“Moreso than the likeness, it has to reflect the personality and the spirit of the person. So, if there is no light inside of them, the portrait is academic—it's just dead,” she said. “I want the work that I do to move the viewer emotionally; I want them to look at it and connect with that person.” janetmaines.com.