The act of portraiture is the forging of a relationship between the artist, the artist's tools and the subject. 
It is a transference of a personality into an inanimate medium with the hopes of documenting that form and eliciting 
a certain emotion from the viewer. Whether the lifelikeness of the portrait comes from the rendered expression or a 
certain envelopment of persona in the paint is a difficult question. Is a portrait merely a sign for the person, or 
is it rather a capturing of sort of 'essence' of their personality? Day to day interactions hold a similar dilemma.
 When communicating, are we letting people pass through us in some hippy new age energy transference, or are we simply
 deciphering symbolic facial patterns and assessing assimilated signs? 

In these portraits, I have chosen to hide the faces as an investigation of the rendered form. Yes there is expression
 that can be seen in the top of the face, but I wonder if there can be something felt from the abstract qualities of
 the neck in the place of these familiar facial codes. 

I have painted these portraits from photographs. In this way I am coldly rendering these forms bit by bit. 
On the other hand these subjects are people I know well, and I am painting them with a certain romantic intimacy not
 found in copying. Each stroke is in some sense 'imbued' with a feeling I have of them, staring at their image and 
laying down in paint every facet of their expression. These paintings in the end 'feel' like their subjects. 
In such the problem remains two fold. Are these portraits dry renderings or romantic capturings of a person,
 and is my perception of them an understanding of specific visual signs or a transference of the captured essence? 
-Elizabeth Jaeger