Lifescapes
Watercolor Portraits by P. Smallwood

P. Smallwood’s signature theme is Lifescapes, watercolor portraits that reveal the subject’s story through a gesture and surroundings transformed into visual storytelling. Through the composition, line, form and finely finished surfaces, Smallwood creates compelling portraits that convey a feeling about how the subjects live their lives.

Smallwood has an artist agenda. He wants to engage the viewer to stop, take note, and connect with the subject’s emotional experience of life. As an African American artist, he wants the viewer to experience the common thread of emotions, aspirations and desires of the people he paints from the backwoods and the backstreets. They are faces many viewers typically do not bother to notice, or skim over as unimportant. Smallwood’s Lifescapes put them center stage. He holds them up and honors them.

As a primarily self-taught artist, the process by which he creates a Lifescape is intuitive and exploratory. He creates from his own vision rather from any particular artistic school. His artistic vision is unique, specific and intentional. His work is highly drafted and finely finished.

The Subject
Smallwood starts by looking for a subject and setting with a compelling story. He goes to the backwoods and the backstreets, looking for the moment, the sunlight, the tableau that he will use for his painting. Sometimes the subject is a stranger, and sometimes someone close to him. He takes a series of photographs and makes thumbnails sketches from which to create the composition and lighting. He likes to portray subjects in natural light that provides the full light spectrum, in mid-afternoon when the light is most intense and casts the most dramatic shadows.

His favorite subjects are the young and the elderly, whose expression of their life experience emerges closer to the surface.

Watercolor: Approach and Technique
Smallwood’s standard is to create watercolor portraits with the quality of finish of oil paintings. His work began with the more traditionally loose watercolor brushstrokes, as in the 1997 work Anticipation, and as his technical skills progress, takes on the more refined forms and surfaces seen in the 2008 work Southern Comfort.

He selects the subject’s most revealing gesture and environmental elements, and subtly manipulates the background lines, tones, colors and composition to evoke the maximal moment of feeling and recognition in the viewer.

The composition, lines and lighting all draw the viewer’s eye into the subject. Once there, the framing and gesture of the subject convey a feeling. For example, in Another Morning I Rise, the subject is framed stretching in front of a sheet blowing in the breeze on a clothes line in the dappled light of the afternoon. The moment is slow, the time late in the afternoon, and of her life. The subject stretches her back after many years of labor.

Smallwood is striving for the seamless surface of a constructed realism. His subjects are tightly drafted with keen attention to perspective, form and how the light spectrum falls on the subject to tell the visual story. These elements are most apparent in his subject’s skin tone, which has a smooth finish that reflects his fascination with both figure drawing and watercolor painting. He carefully layers his watercolors, frequently using dark colors first, and mixing paint with casein to achieve a desired finish.

The Story
The most important result for Smallwood is to engage the viewer with the subject’s story, so that they spend time visually moving through every aspect of the Lifescape until they arrive at the emotion of the subject him or herself.

In his signature work Desire, we see how the elements differentiate a Lifescape from a traditional portrait. The young girl is prominently featured in the painting so that she compels the viewer’s attention. She is placed against the worn out, faded washboard surface of a neighborhood home. Her face is cameoed in the dramatic shadows of the intense light of the afternoon, and her mahogany skin reveals a rich, yet subtle range of colors reflecting the color spectrum of the bright sunlight.

The vertical and horizontal lines of the background draw the reader into the subject, while at the same time grounding the subject in her world. Her twin sister shadows the subject’s form, provocatively suggesting there is something hidden, or emerging, from the subject herself.

The girl’s shirt is too small, a hand-me-down faded from hundreds of washings. Yet the strong shadow beneath the collar and under her chin serve almost as a visual throne reinforcing that her face and expression are not only the subject, but the regal object, of the viewer’s attention. Her eyes look directly at you, as if to say “I am here. My story, my hopes, my desires, struggles and challenges are solidly here before you. I deserve to be seen.” Her hair, and its shadow, emanate from her face almost like sun rays, energetic and life affirming.

There is no romanticizing or masking of the human complexity of the subject’s life. Even with Smallwood’s artistic manipulations, it is realism of the deepest form. It is the subject and the emotional landscape of her life that Smallwood wants us to recognize.

Smallwood is currently working on a series of six Lifescapes of a young male in the urban backstreets of the Bronx, using the electric colors and metallic forms of the inner city to tell the multi-dimensional story of one individual. Simmering with the contemporary energy of the urban streets, the hustle and grit of the subject’s life will be explored in this series.