Portraits are almost awkward by definition: how to pose; to smile or not to smile; what to include in the background. All these decisions, and the primary decision to have ones portrait painted in the first place, give all but the best portraits a sense of awkwardness. Self-portraits are worse by degree. The give and take between artist and sitter — which might excuse some of the awkwardness — is absent. The self-consciousness cannot be avoided.

In the lobby of the (new) Gittins Gallery, where you’ll currently find the exhibit of recently retired ceramics professor Brian Snapp and several of his former students, a self-portrait by the gallery’s namesake hangs above the front desk. Alvin Gittins was for decades a professor of art at the University of Utah and the state’s best-known portraitist. A native of England who was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he came to Utah to study at Brigham Young University and was immediately hired by the University of Utah when he graduated. If you were important in Utah in the postwar years, you probably had your portrait painted by Gittins. (Even if you were dead: Gittins’ portrait of Joseph Smith is the best-known image of the LDS Church’s founder). One of his portraits hangs in almost every building of the University of Utah campus.

His own hangs in the newly built gallery in the Film and Media Arts building. It was painted in 1981, just before his death at the age of 59.  It’s a fairly traditional portrait. The artist, seen from the waist up, fills three quarters of the canvas and is framed by his palette, in the foreground, and, on one side, by his easel and canvas. His brush is raised to apply paint to the unseen canvas, as if we have captured him in the middle of his work. The glasses perched on the edge of his nose, and the gray of his beard, indicate his advancing years. His eyes look just off center of the viewer, presumably at his current subject, or, in this case, a mirror. It’s all a fairly straightforward portrait of a hardworking artist.

But there’s the leather jacket. Bomber-style. Brown and gleaming under the studio lights. Maybe someone who sat for or studied under Gittins will know: did he usually paint in a leather jacket? Did he not have heat in his studio? Painting in an unheated garret was an artistic stereotype of previous generations, of artists poor and starving. Gittins was neither, and if he didn’t have heat in the studio, a couple of sweaters and a scarf might have been easier to work in. But Gittins was always known as a dapper fellow – elegant, charming, well-dressed. Which the leather jacket shows. Still, it’s hard to believe he painted in one. The noise alone would be distracting. And it’s just rather stiff and limiting for someone who must constantly move his arm from palette to canvas in small, precise movements. 

Though, come to think of it, as far as wiping off smudges of oil paint from one’s clothes, there might be nothing better.

This is the first in a series of articles we’ll be running looking at idiosyncrasies in individual works of art from public collections.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.