While stuffed animals with human traits are high atop the hills of fuzzy-warm-cuteness, certain robots and artistic realism can plunge into the valley of uncanny-alongside corpses and zombies.

Portrait paintings have always given me the creeps. “The creeps,” in my opinion, is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it is a state of eerie bewilderment that sends the imagination soaring into shadowy areas of intrigue.

If the artist’s scheme is to make the canvas so realistic that it actually lives, then they would do well to reread the ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 tale, The Oval Portrait. “And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved: She was dead!”

Poe’s tale serves as a warning to artists who become so engrossed in inanimate objects that they are oblivious to life. Also, this story serves as an intriguing introduction to the concept of the Uncanny Valley. While the Uncanny Valley may be a familiar notion to artists and avid fans of animation and cybernetics, its general familiarity exists via the repulsion audiences reveal through lost ticket sales in regards to such disturbing movies as The Polar Express and Beowulf.

This “valley” is an imaginary place first named by the roboticist Masahiro Mori to describe the dipping area on a graph of creepy emotional responses toward near-human representations. While stuffed animals with human traits are high atop the hills of fuzzy-warm-cuteness, certain robots and artistic realism can plunge into the valley of uncanny-alongside corpses
and zombies.

The contemporary portrait painter is, of course, free from the historical, utilitarian constraints of painting for identification purposes. Now we have surveillance cameras on every street corner to meet that certain societal “need.” So contemporary portraiture can be liberated and elevated to a more poetic and painterly realm. The painter’s hand mediates the person’s likeness in gestural brushstrokes, always putting a bit of himself in the picture and creating a contemplative space for another living, or once living, human being.

While contemporary portraits of the living seem to serve narcissistic, decorative goals, portraits of the dead may serve our deeper, philosophical need to cope with mortality. Portraits of dead people may actually contain the remains of the dead person, serving as two-dimensional urns.

Artists working in this field often have mixed feelings. The Chicago artist Joe Sikora (http://sikoraportraits.blogspot.com/) was hesitant, at first, to work with the medium of oil or charcoal and human ashes. He has been approached on several occasions to paint portraits from photographs, using a deceased person’s ashes, and has worked through many of the barriers and ambivalences that he first felt toward the work.

Besides the social, emotional, and superstitious barriers, a feeling that such a portrait may lean toward the creepy or uncanny persists. Oddly, knowing that a portrait is partially made of the deceased’s remains does not automatically qualify the painting a place in the Uncanny Valley. In fact, once one gets accustomed to the idea, and if the painting is not like a creepy-robot, it seems to have the opposite effect-transforming the remains of the corpse into a two-dimensional memento mori that reminds us of the precious brevity of life.

In Edgar Allen Poe’s day, the cult of mourning mixed with the improved mortuary science of embalming strived for a sublimation of death. Making a corpse look exquisite became the custom. Sublimation transforms something negative or unwanted into something more desirable. Is this not something we should all try to do on a daily basis? Fight depression, fight miserablism, fight the greed that surrounds us by the repressive powers that be-not by a Pollyanna-type denial, but by a careful juxtaposition that acknowledges the horrors of life along with liberations of the imagination.

On the other hand, reading various texts on art and death-texts that seem to rely heavily on people like Lacan saying the symbol “manifests itself first of all as the death of the thing,” or, to grotesquely paraphrase several thousand anti-occularcentric theorists, “the gaze is bad so we should poke our eyes out”-would seem to shun the act of painting or even looking at anything at all. I don’t want to poke my eyes out or stop making art. I read Poe’s story of The Oval Portrait as very dark humor used to warn those that would value things that are not only dead, but which have always been dead, over things that are very much alive.

by Renay Kerkman