Minnesota artists talk about what makes a good portrait

Doris Simonett, 96, wore chunky black-framed glasses, funky pants, a loose black shirt and a big smile.

Copies of the New York Times and the New Yorker were piled on the side table in her apartment, and the walls were covered with art. There are portraits of Doris and her late husband, former Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice John E. Simonett, painted during a trip to Europe. There’s one of Doris’ father that she painted.

Across from a photograph of a younger Doris was a more recent painted portrait of Doris. Classically trained Italian fresco painter Charles Kapsner painted it last fall. Kapsner is an old friend of hers from Little Falls, Minn.

We talked with Minnesota artists who paint portraits about what makes a good portrait.

“What’s really most important is … catching the essence of that person,” Kapsner said. “In the case of Doris and myself, we had this just long history.”

Portraiture can be very difficult, Kapsner said.

“People might see themselves very differently than what the artist does — and even if you have an incredible photograph," he added.

“He painted the blouse black, and it was a little somber, I thought,” her daughter, Martha Simonett, said. “Then mom thought about it, and she said ‘Let’s change the color.’”

Black became lavender.

“I was kind of shocked ― I don’t think of myself as having all those wrinkles and stuff,” Doris Simonett said of her portrait. “I think of myself as I used to be, you know?”

A picture says a thousand words. But a portrait? It could bare your soul.

One of the most famous portraits of all time, the Mona Lisa, has its own room at the Louvre. People commission portraits for weddings and funerals but also for friends, family and pets.

In artist Suzann Beck’s studio in northeast Minneapolis’ California Building, portraiture rules.

A pile of prints of a recent funeral portrait commission were scattered near framed portraits of a Black woman with a flower in her hair and another of a dainty blue-eyed cat.

On a steamy July afternoon, Beck was busy drawing a live portrait of Sarah Joy Bruce, a professional cellist.

“The strings are always the hardest,” Beck said.

She concentrated, looked at Bruce, switched tools, drew a few more lines.

Beck always has been drawn to painting people but didn’t get around to it until ending her 30-year career in graphic design and marketing.

“I guess there was a painter inside screaming to get out because I would go to the museums and see the European portraits,” she said. “Then I would always get this urge to go home and do it myself.”

She mostly paints portraits on commission.

“When [the person commissioning the portrait] knows the subject, I find that likeness or accuracy is the most important thing,” she said. “If you’re doing a portrait that is going to have public appeal, I think narrative is the asset that’s most important.”

“I have a high degree of accuracy, and so when that’s important people come to me,” she added.

Artists Jon Swihart and Kimberly Merrill moved from Los Angeles to Savage, Minn., in late 2022, seeking a quieter lifestyle. In Santa Monica, Calif. they hosted epic, monthly artist community potlucks in their backyard. In Savage, there’s little more sound than cars whizzing down mostly empty streets.

Swihart, a California native, fell into portraiture accidentally. He started painting portraits in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but kept it mostly quiet because portraiture is often associated with “selling out,” he said.

But the commissions kept coming.

Today, his star-studded clients include actor Clint Eastwood, former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and architect Frank Gehry, to name a few.

“Especially when I’ve painted famous people, I realize they’re just as self-conscious or wanting approval as I am,” Swihart said. “I painted Walter Cronkite years ago, and when I was working on it his secretary called me and was talking really quietly, and she said: ‘You know, Walter asked if you could tame his eyebrows.’ I was like, ‘That’s what he’s self-conscious about!’”

Artist Jonathan Aller dabbed bits of orange paint onto a portrait he was painting in his newly remodeled basement studio in the south Minneapolis home he shares with his family.

Aller grew up in Miami, and his family hails from Chile and Brazil. As a kid, his dream was to become an animator for Disney but that changed when the industry shifted toward computer animation.

Aller changed course and studied in Florence, Italy for three years, learning from masters of European art history. It was there that he met his wife, who is from Minnesota. They returned together and started a family.

Aller also holds a master of fine arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).

“I’m drawn to portraits,” he said. “There’s something about a portrait, you know, through the eyes of a portrait of a sitter, that you can get so much from them.”

“This was a guy I actually met through the city bus,” he said. “The more I talked to him, he told me he had Argentinian roots, and he just looks like, you know ― we’re both very light complexion but we’re Latino, and I felt kind of this connection with him already.”

Sometimes portraits are sparked by that simpatico ― but other times, it’s simply about timing.

It was a busy evening at MCAD’s annual art auction and recent bachelor of fine arts graduate Wren Clinefelter, who uses they/them pronouns, drew three-minute sketches of anyone who wanted to pose.

It was much calmer on a July morning in their air-conditioned third-floor studio in south Minneapolis. Studio cat Wisty, a tabby, gently rubbed up against Clinefelter’s legs. Rather than warm up for the day by drawing portraits based on images from their Pinterest (“the algorithm knows me,” they said), they started drawing the cat.

The warm-up sessions are important, especially when it comes to the sort of live portraiture events they’ve started exploring since graduating with a BFA in comic illustration.