Teeth Showing

[Rochelle Brown]

Tombstones in the mouth would be pretty scary, Tom; Chicklets are somewhat more appealing. My teeth are crooked and yellow even after years of painful braces. I notice that most of the portraits on your website are smiling.

[Lon Haverly]

I have drawn tens of thousands of smiles with teeth, but, if the teeth are bad, it is very hard to draw the portrait. I once had to draw an older gentleman from a photo which had bad teeth showing - REALLY BAD! I drew them as they were, impressionistically. The customer rejected the portrait, however, citing no specific reason. She later gave me a picture of the man without a smile. I redid the portrait, and she happily paid me.

I do not draw smiles anymore if the teeth are bad. (Most people do not smile with bad teeth anyway!)

[Tammy Nielsen]

Lon, did you ever look at John Wayne's teeth? Awful. I painted them and they looked alright but I wondered why he never fixed them.

[Timothy C. Tyler]

I agree with Chris about the timelessness of non-toothy smiles. Many capable artists before us have been quite able to paint anything, including teeth, and have CHOSEN not to. I rather prefer smirks and grins and even twinkles in the eyes.

Furthermore these looks are far more engaging to look upon.

Maybe charging more for teeth is a good policy - about $20,000 more.

[Michele Rushworth]

It seems to me that the reason the "old masters" painted more subdued expressions (no teeth) is because they didn't have photographs to work from that captured those brief flashing smiles. We think of these traditional old portraits and that's what has created the aesthetic we often try to emulate today.

I'm happy to paint a portrait either way, depending on the character of the subject and what happens during the photo sessions. Sometimes the irrepressible joy of a kid is what a parent wants to capture and remember and a beaming smile is the only way to express that.

[Mike McCarty]

A couple of years ago I did a pastel of two sisters sitting back to back and both looking at you with big bright pearly whites. Their father was my DENTIST!

[Michael Georges]

Also consider that in "Olden Tymes" (TM) people generally lost their teeth quite early on. Those teeth that remained were not always the nicest to look upon.

George Washington was particularly known to have very bad teeth. In the civil war, the requirement for being a soldier was that you have two good front teeth to bite the paper casing off the bullet cartridge.

I believe that the main reason teeth have been omitted is that they were not attractive.

That said, I prefer a not to paint teeth where possible. You generally get a much more interesting subject when they smile but don't show teeth.

[Marvin Mattelson]

The old masters probably didn't paint smiles because most of their subjects were missing their teeth.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Back to the old concept that people will buy what they can see. If you have toothy grins in your portfolio, you will tend to attract clients that like their children's portraits with toothy grins. Robert Schoeller almost never painted them and thus, was seldom asked, but still had plenty of work. He attracted the kind of work that he showed.

I've often theorized that the reason there were so few smiles in portraits and photos of old also had a lot to do with the fact that life was very hard for most people. I wouldn't be smiling much if I had to do laundry by hand, do canning for the winter, heat my stove with wood I had to chop, make candles for light, etc. Of course, the wealthy had servants to do that.

[Tom Edgerton]

Mike, I can empathize. The hardest commission I ever had was a little boy and BOTH of his parents were orthodontists. They not only wanted him as he was, but, I think at least subconsciously, wanted him as he would be when they were done correcting his smile. I ended up having to try and read their minds, an exercise in diminishing returns.

Rochelle is right that a lot of my portraits show some teeth. Partly because, I think, I'm comfortable painting them, and partly because my interaction with and attitude toward the sitters creates that kind of feeling. I do worry sometimes that I end up liking the subjects TOO much, and that it skews the work, especially in the portraits of children.

As regards the old masters, who can say what actually was going on? The necessity for subjects to sit for long periods, in lieu of photographic sessions, was the main factor, I believe. However I still come down on the position that if your subjects smile a lot - are very extroverted, outward and warm - that's how you should portray them. I'll leave it to the work of Frans Hals, one of my heroes, to make my point.

Happy painting (no pun intended)!