How can portraiture elicit participation

In recent years, artists such as Lucian Freud and David Hockney have shown that drawing offers a temporal pictorial realism for portraiture, by layering time within the pictorial composition. As a result, these artists have challenged the representational power of the photograph and have shown that a greater duration of subject participation results in a heightened but differing form of realism compared to that of photographic realism. Three series of artworks by the author, Identify, Identity, Identikit (2012), Parts of you are dying (2013) and As Long as you’re here (2013) test the importance of ‘layered time’ and subject participation in shaping the representational structures of portraiture. An analysis of these works demonstrates strategies for contemporary portraiture to enhance subject participation.