Artist’s Perspective – Why I Won’t Depict The Face Of Jesus
Zimou Tan, an Americacn artist, a master of portraiture, explains why he never depicts the face of Jesus.
In one of his interviews Zimou Tan mentions that he was always drawn to portraiture because of the various physical and spiritual elements involved in creating a portrait including the aura of a person’s soul.
Zimou Tan:
The hardest part for the portraiture, is capturing the people’s soul. The likeness is the foundation of what we do but capturing the soul of the person is different.
When you look at a painting, it looks like the aura is engaging with you, communicating with you, and has some time feeling like somebody’s looking at you. Right? And when you look at a portraiture, that’s more than just copying the subject.
It’s kind of ironic in the way that I painted Jesus because I never painted Jesus with a straight on portrait. A lot of times I either put him under shade, under the shadow or thinking really small, the face is not clear enough. I’m a portrait specialist. Portrait is my specialty, but I do not have that courage. I don’t think that I have that right to narrow down how Jesus looked like.
God is too big for my canvas and perhaps Jesus looks different to people based on cultural context.
