A portrait creates a correspondence between the form of a real face and the lines of a drawing. The entire history of art reflects this search for correspondence between reality and representation. But reality shifts constantly; light, point of view and forms change, and new, alternative lines and forms are required to convey a mobile, probable, possible reality.

Giacometti, never satisfied with the lines he traced, searched obsessively for a form capable of representing reality. Pontormo drew multiple, superimposed lines as alternative suggestions of reality. In part the lines drawn by Pontormo and Giacometti are apt, in part the chance product of gesture. The viewer’s eye is left to seek a correspondence between representation and ‘reality’.

Both the stroke of a pen and its digital equivalent can portray a face and fix an image. Thus, for some time I have traced the boundaries between light and dark on a computer screen; strangely these lines succeed in representing a face.

The faces portrayed on my screen are a series of Beziér1 curves, or paths. With a few user-defined parameters a path can describe any form. Easy to manipulate mathematically, such curves are used to generate most digital drawings, such as the alphabetical characters that we view daily on our computer screens.

The use of Beziér curves allows me to introduce an element of chance into a drawing, and measure the extent to which a design may be altered and yet remain recognizable, a feasible likeness2.
Modification to the parameters of the paths generates confusion and liquidity, as do random repetition and superimposition of the altered curves. The viewer is left to identify each face.

With this mode of drawing, no curve is identical to another, and yet all curves resemble the original Beziér and a feasible reality. Thus the uniqueness of manual execution is preserved; every portrait in this collection may be drawn innumerable times, yet each execution will be unique and the representation of a possible reality.