Portrait in Delay: Drawing Through Space and Influence
When artists draw, there is always a delay—an inherent gap between perception and mark-making. Pure accuracy is a fiction. What we call likeness is often the product of imagination, a constructed illusion that suggests a kind of portrait accuracy. As I wrote in an earlier blog post on Frans Hals’ portraiture: What is the goal of portraiture if not to reach for that immediacy and enduring modernity that Hals mastered centuries ago?
In the portrait of my brother sleeping—which I can now only render from a distance, with eye-tracking on my PC screen since returning to Japan—the delay becomes part of the motif. It saturates the studio practice. It feels like drawing through an unseen fog: the image is real and immovable, yet always slightly out of reach. But this delay opens onto a new aesthetic space, shaped by the inevitability of lag.
Drawing does not unfold in time as we often imagine; it operates in space, under shifting influences. Every time you return to the studio, the motif has changed—contrasts shift, tones drift, sunlight transforms the subject. I learned this through painting: morning, noon, late afternoon, and evening light leave distinct traces. I began painting these traces side by side, allowing them to coexist across the canvas, and I called this Object Painting. Even as a five-year-old I felt this paradox: we are here and we are not here. The same is true of sunlight and clouds—they pirouette across the sky and across my canvas.
In my portrait of my brother, the Texta eye-tracking marks record this condition. They reveal the delays, the shifts, the inherent instability of the motif. In that sense, the drawing becomes an essay on perception and change. Here, fine art subjugates art writing — not the other way around. This is the space where raw neural impulses tunnel through the eye-tracking optics, attempting to minimise delay so the artist can render what is sensed and what matters.
