A portrait head in progress, painted in oils by Tarragon. The picture was snapped under suboptimal lighting conditions, as you can see by the glare in the model's hair.
A profile is always a difficult portrait to make engaging. In real life, we tend to look at the eyes - if only briefly - of the people we meet. It's by facial expression, after all, that we normally gauge whether a stranger is friendly or not. The same instincts tend to kick in when we meet a portrait.
But people depicted in profile cannot meet our gaze, and because we cannot assess their expressions fully, they often appear unsympathetic. A great many profile pictures have a certain hardness to them and some famous examples rely on brittle edginess to achieve their effect. In this example, Tarragon's taken the opposite approach. By using warm colours and gentle modelling of the flesh, he's softened what might have been a very austere picture.
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