Drawn to the Essence

Salt Lake Tribune,  2006

Berniece Burt sits in a chair on a wooden platform, hands clasped in her lap and her eyes turned toward the soft northern light from a window of the Salt Lake City loft studio.
Across from her, Jeffrey Hein lifts a brush to his easel, where the 70-year-old woman’s face and torso appear in oil paint on a linen canvas. It’s a good likeness: accurate but not falsely flattering, straightforward yet twinkling with humor.
“I should have done this when I was 30 and beautiful. But it’s never too late,” says Burt, a Salt Lake City widow and art collector, ticking off a list of goals she’s accomplished in recent years since her husband died: Visit Europe. Earn a master’s degree. Have her portrait painted.
“There are things in life that you should do,” she adds, with the authority that comes with age, self-awareness and not caring what other people think. “I’m going to hang it up on my wall. Right in the living room as you come in the door.”

Venerable genre: By commissioning a portrait, Burt is doing what wealthy patrons and dignitaries have done for centuries. One of the most venerable genres of art, portrait painting dates to ancient Greece and Rome, when artists sculpted idealized images of gods and emperors. The artform flourished again during the Renaissance – history’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” was completed in 1507 – and a century

later in the Baroque period with portraits by artists like Rembrandt.
Until the 19th century, portrait subjects were usually people of wealth or power who viewed being immortalized on canvas as a way of reaffirming their importance. But in the 1800s, artists such as Gericault and Toulouse-Lautrec began painting ordinary people.
By the mid-1900s, classic portraiture had fallen out of fashion, eclipsed by abstract art and the rise of photography. Why spend hours painting someone’s portrait when you could snap a photo in seconds? But in recent decades, portrait painting has made a comeback among people nostalgic for something with unique, lasting value in an increasingly disposable and mass-produced consumer culture.
“[A portrait] is a historic document,” says Provo artist William WhitÂaker, one of Utah’s leading portrait painters. “It’ll be around for a long, long time. I’m very much aware that what I’m doing may not be fully appreciated for another 200 years.”
A traditional painter, Whitaker has contributed several documents to the historical record of contemporary Utah. The LDS Church hired him in the mid-1990s to create the official portrait of President Gordon B. Hinckley. And in 2003, Whitaker did the state portrait of then-Gov. Mike Leavitt.
Hinckley sits in a leather armchair, holding the viewer with a steady, paternal gaze, while Leavitt stands confidently before a background of Utah mountains, fingering his eyeglasses. Although the subjects of official portraits can sometimes look as if they’re embalmed, both men exude life, naturalness and even warmth.
Whitaker believes portraits painted from life are better than photographs at capturing someone’s spiritual dimension. Ask the artist to explain how he accomplishes that feat, and words fail him.
“I have no idea how I do it,” he says of his creative process. “I just keep at it until its feels right.”
 Not just for the wealthy: Prominent figures have long sat for official portraits that hang in public buildings. But in recent decades, as the nation has grown more affluent, more regular folks are hiring artists to paint their loved ones – most often spouses, children and even pets.
Most formal portraits require the subject to pose for several hours while the artist records facial features. Fees vary according to the artist’s reputation and the complexity of the portrait; a simple head-and-shoulders sketch typically costs $1,000 or less, while a full-length oil painting of a family can command upward of $10,000.
“People think of it as magic, but it’s not. It’s really more like a science,” says Hein, who approaches each portrait analytically. “If you get even a millimeter off with the face, you lose an element of likeness. It’s incredibly difficult to capture a person’s mouth, because it changes from moment to moment. It has so many muscles. You can kind of blow it on the eyes and still pull off a portrait. But if you blow it on the mouth, you’re screwed.”
To keep their subjects comfortable and fresh, most artists prefer to break up portrait sessions into multiple sittings. Because today’s busy professionals often can’t commit such big chunks of time, many artists also work from photographs, especially when painting fidgety children or filling in surrounding details such as clothing.
Bountiful artist Justin Hayward has done a dozen portraits in the past year, all from photos. He would rather paint people from life, but all his commissions so far have come from out of state. Hayward is working on portraits of two young brothers who live with their parents in Washington, D.C. To get a sense of the boys’ personalities, Hayward flew to Washington and photographed them. He also interviewed each boy about his interests.
 ”I like to sit down with the client for a while and just talk to them before anything else happens,” says Hayward, who was one of seven honorees this year in a National Portrait Gallery competition that attracted more than 4,000 artists. “It’s really about trying to please the client. If they’re happy, I’ve done my job.”

In that sense, a hired portrait painter is not unlike, say, a carpenter installing a new kitchen. But fine art is arguably more complex than cabinetry. And like many contractors, artists prefer to put their own creative stamp on their work.
Creative control: All portrait painters have stories about demanding clients who dictate rigid conditions for every aspect of a painting or insist that a portrait be redone to look more flattering. Hayward’s Washington, D.C., parents didn’t like the photograph he took of their youngest son and asked him to incorporate the boy’s smile from a second snapshot and a hairstyle from a third.
By contrast, a client in Michigan has entrusted Hayward to paint his wife and daughters in his own way.
“He said, ‘You have complete artistic freedom. Do whatever you want,’ ” Hayward says. “That makes it really fun.”
Whitaker and Hein refuse to do commissioned portraits unless they retain some creative control. Hein likes to come up with a concept for each painting. For example, after visiting Burt’s home, which is filled with antique furnishings, he chose to pose her as a wealthy Renaissance-era matron with a starched collar and a white miniature (stuffed) poodle in her lap. Burt loved the idea.
An adventurous woman with sense of humor about herself, Burt is perhaps not a typical portrait client. Her friends, for example, don’t all share her lack of vanity about the experience.
“Some of them are just horrified at the idea,” she says. “They see it as pride. It’s kind of a frightening situation to see yourself [through the eyes of an artist] if that’s not how you see yourself – particularly for a woman.”
The alchemy of portrait painting is hard to qualify. Hein sees the process as a science, while to Whitaker it is more mysterious. But the artists agree that it’s relatively easy to produce a decent physical likeness of someone. Capturing a person’s character or spirit, on the other hand, is much harder. Hein says it takes him about 20 hours of work to complete a typical portrait, and in many cases the painting doesn’t come together until the very end.
“It’s cool to watch in those last 10 minutes when the figure really comes to life,” he says. “The clients come in and say, ‘Oh my gosh, you captured their personality. How did you do that?’ And I say, ‘I just painted what I see.’ I guess people carry their personality around on their face.” 

Berniece Burt sits in a chair on a wooden platform, hands clasped in her lap and her eyes turned toward the soft northern light from a window of the Salt Lake City loft studio.
Across from her, Jeffrey Hein lifts a brush to his easel, where the 70-year-old woman’s face and torso appear in oil paint on a linen canvas. It’s a good likeness: accurate but not falsely flattering, straightforward yet twinkling with humor.
“I should have done this when I was 30 and beautiful. But it’s never too late,” says Burt, a Salt Lake City widow and art collector, ticking off a list of goals she’s accomplished in recent years since her husband died: Visit Europe. Earn a master’s degree. Have her portrait painted.
“There are things in life that you should do,” she adds, with the authority that comes with age, self-awareness and not caring what other people think. “I’m going to hang it up on my wall. Right in the living room as you come in the door.”

Venerable genre: By commissioning a portrait, Burt is doing what wealthy patrons and dignitaries have done for centuries. One of the most venerable genres of art, portrait painting dates to ancient Greece and Rome, when artists sculpted idealized images of gods and emperors. The artform flourished again during the Renaissance – history’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” was completed in 1507 – and a century

later in the Baroque period with portraits by artists like Rembrandt.
Until the 19th century, portrait subjects were usually people of wealth or power who viewed being immortalized on canvas as a way of reaffirming their importance. But in the 1800s, artists such as Gericault and Toulouse-Lautrec began painting ordinary people.
By the mid-1900s, classic portraiture had fallen out of fashion, eclipsed by abstract art and the rise of photography. Why spend hours painting someone’s portrait when you could snap a photo in seconds? But in recent decades, portrait painting has made a comeback among people nostalgic for something with unique, lasting value in an increasingly disposable and mass-produced consumer culture.
“[A portrait] is a historic document,” says Provo artist William WhitÂaker, one of Utah’s leading portrait painters. “It’ll be around for a long, long time. I’m very much aware that what I’m doing may not be fully appreciated for another 200 years.”
A traditional painter, Whitaker has contributed several documents to the historical record of contemporary Utah. The LDS Church hired him in the mid-1990s to create the official portrait of President Gordon B. Hinckley. And in 2003, Whitaker did the state portrait of then-Gov. Mike Leavitt.
Hinckley sits in a leather armchair, holding the viewer with a steady, paternal gaze, while Leavitt stands confidently before a background of Utah mountains, fingering his eyeglasses. Although the subjects of official portraits can sometimes look as if they’re embalmed, both men exude life, naturalness and even warmth.
Whitaker believes portraits painted from life are better than photographs at capturing someone’s spiritual dimension. Ask the artist to explain how he accomplishes that feat, and words fail him.
“I have no idea how I do it,” he says of his creative process. “I just keep at it until its feels right.”
 Not just for the wealthy: Prominent figures have long sat for official portraits that hang in public buildings. But in recent decades, as the nation has grown more affluent, more regular folks are hiring artists to paint their loved ones – most often spouses, children and even pets.
Most formal portraits require the subject to pose for several hours while the artist records facial features. Fees vary according to the artist’s reputation and the complexity of the portrait; a simple head-and-shoulders sketch typically costs $1,000 or less, while a full-length oil painting of a family can command upward of $10,000.
“People think of it as magic, but it’s not. It’s really more like a science,” says Hein, who approaches each portrait analytically. “If you get even a millimeter off with the face, you lose an element of likeness. It’s incredibly difficult to capture a person’s mouth, because it changes from moment to moment. It has so many muscles. You can kind of blow it on the eyes and still pull off a portrait. But if you blow it on the mouth, you’re screwed.”
To keep their subjects comfortable and fresh, most artists prefer to break up portrait sessions into multiple sittings. Because today’s busy professionals often can’t commit such big chunks of time, many artists also work from photographs, especially when painting fidgety children or filling in surrounding details such as clothing.
Bountiful artist Justin Hayward has done a dozen portraits in the past year, all from photos. He would rather paint people from life, but all his commissions so far have come from out of state. Hayward is working on portraits of two young brothers who live with their parents in Washington, D.C. To get a sense of the boys’ personalities, Hayward flew to Washington and photographed them. He also interviewed each boy about his interests.
 ”I like to sit down with the client for a while and just talk to them before anything else happens,” says Hayward, who was one of seven honorees this year in a National Portrait Gallery competition that attracted more than 4,000 artists. “It’s really about trying to please the client. If they’re happy, I’ve done my job.”

In that sense, a hired portrait painter is not unlike, say, a carpenter installing a new kitchen. But fine art is arguably more complex than cabinetry. And like many contractors, artists prefer to put their own creative stamp on their work.
Creative control: All portrait painters have stories about demanding clients who dictate rigid conditions for every aspect of a painting or insist that a portrait be redone to look more flattering. Hayward’s Washington, D.C., parents didn’t like the photograph he took of their youngest son and asked him to incorporate the boy’s smile from a second snapshot and a hairstyle from a third.
By contrast, a client in Michigan has entrusted Hayward to paint his wife and daughters in his own way.
“He said, ‘You have complete artistic freedom. Do whatever you want,’ ” Hayward says. “That makes it really fun.”
Whitaker and Hein refuse to do commissioned portraits unless they retain some creative control. Hein likes to come up with a concept for each painting. For example, after visiting Burt’s home, which is filled with antique furnishings, he chose to pose her as a wealthy Renaissance-era matron with a starched collar and a white miniature (stuffed) poodle in her lap. Burt loved the idea.
An adventurous woman with sense of humor about herself, Burt is perhaps not a typical portrait client. Her friends, for example, don’t all share her lack of vanity about the experience.
“Some of them are just horrified at the idea,” she says. “They see it as pride. It’s kind of a frightening situation to see yourself [through the eyes of an artist] if that’s not how you see yourself – particularly for a woman.”
The alchemy of portrait painting is hard to qualify. Hein sees the process as a science, while to Whitaker it is more mysterious. But the artists agree that it’s relatively easy to produce a decent physical likeness of someone. Capturing a person’s character or spirit, on the other hand, is much harder. Hein says it takes him about 20 hours of work to complete a typical portrait, and in many cases the painting doesn’t come together until the very end.
“It’s cool to watch in those last 10 minutes when the figure really comes to life,” he says. “The clients come in and say, ‘Oh my gosh, you captured their personality. How did you do that?’ And I say, ‘I just painted what I see.’ I guess people carry their personality around on their face.”