Mona Lisa’s smile

Painting portraits isn’t something I do very often, but back in 2018, I got this feeling that it was time to paint a self-portrait. I hadn’t made one in years and thought maybe I should, because it is a good exercise and interesting work to look back to. I have a fair amount of experience with digital painting (meaning painting on the computer), but this was my first painting on an iPad, providing the advantage of easily recording process videos (see below).

Recording of Self Portrait

Earlier this year, a friend of mine, having seen the self-portrait, approached me asking if I would paint a portrait of her three-year-old niece Sophie. I had never painted a portrait of a little girl, but I was interested in the challenge, so I took the commission.
Since it was going to be a surprise gift for Sophie’s third birthday, she provided a bunch of photographs and videos for me to use as reference. We decided to make it a digital painting, with the advantage of being able to print multiple originals, so she would be able to keep one for her home as well. I went to work and gave her three compositions to choose from, and we went with the classic-style portrait.

Initially, the request was to paint her smiling. A smiling face in a painting can be a charming thing when done right, but I find it also distorts the facial features a lot, to the point where people become almost unrecognizable, sometimes even in photographs. I wanted to emphasize the forms and show her in a calm state of mind as if she would have been sitting for me, and I painted her from life. But since Sophie is a lively kid who smiles a lot, and I wanted to show her character as well, I gave her a little smirk, a Mona Lisa smile.

*Sophie*, 2023
Digital Painting, Pigment Print on Hahnemuehle Baryta
50 x 40 cm

*Mona Lisa*, ca. 1503-1506 (digitally enhanced image from wikipedia)
Leonardo da Vinci 1452 – 1519
Oil on poplar panel
77 x 53 cm

As mentioned earlier, I had never made a painting of a little girl, but I had already made a painting for a little girl, by the name of Olivia. I thought it was a curious parallel, considering how different the paintings are.

*Olive Green (29x24/PO62 PG7)*, 2021
Watercolour and Ink on Paper
36 x 26 cm

And just now, while writing this, the thought of how the Mona Lisa influenced painting the portrait of Sophie, I remembered an old work from years ago creating another parallel:

This was a piece I made after I finished high school for an application portfolio to study art at Central Saint Martins in London. Inspired by Banksy’s stencil and spraying technique at the time, I made this work of a simplified Mona Lisa on thick layered glass sheets. I got accepted at Saint Martins, but the work is now lost.

Is it art?