Portrait of An Old Man by Daniel Graves

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The portrait of an Old Man is painted by a New York born artist Charles Daniel Grave who went to Florence for his love of art and currently possesses a studio in the Italian city since 1978.

I think the essence of portraits is to represent the person in an emphasized way to extrude the real nature, the real appearance or to introduce the masked reality of the person. If the artist captures the personality accurately in the portrait you can vividly imagine the person’s nature in real life. Maybe this couldn’t be true in every case, but you surely get the idea. But if an artist is portraying Hitler, you will never get his depictions cheerful. He would always be rigid, straight and frowned in the paintings. Because that’s the impression of the person is implanted in painter’s mind.

That’s why I said if the painter captures the accurate personality, you will get the perfect nature of the person in the portrait. That’s the real power of any portrait, about which you thought as kind of boring till date.

Now if we try to interpret our theory on the current portrait (oil-on-linen), we see an old weakened man, maybe in his sixties. His body is leaning, his eye leads are heavy and the face is already wrinkly. The nose and ears deliberately made red could be a signal of illness. The person is now considered as a senior citizen.

Behind his wrinkled face and heavy-leaded eyes, we see a self-sustaining person, who doesn’t like to get help from anybody, who likes to do everything on his own. But, now due to weakening body, he is obliged to take help from others. That is the main disadvantage of elderly. Sometimes, you lose your self-esteem due to your dependence on others.

If we look at the painter, he looks very similar to the person in the portrait, as if he made a self-portrait of his old age except the privilege of jamful hairs shown in the portrait. Though, nothing could be said with surety.

The depiction itself could not be more accurate. From the skin tone to the every wrinkly surface and the detailed white hairs to spotty skin of face, everything is realistic. It is just a portrayal of an old man with all the thoughts put into the black background for us to think of.