Christoph Waltz 1054

Original painting by Michele Petrelli ©

The defects of a face
The recognizability of a face lies in its most pronounced features. Those we mistakenly call flaws. In reality they strongly determine the unique personality of a person. Christoph Waltz's face has several marks that make it recognizable: the spacious forehead, the accentuated nose, the expression of the eyebrows, the eyes that are not too big, and especially the slightly misaligned chin. If I were to fail to catch even one of these points, he would certainly continue to look like Christoph, but he would no longer be him. I am very skeptical of cosmetic surgery. Anyone who unifies his physiognomy with that of the canons of the moment is visibilemnte away from the expression of his personality. Because a face expresses everything we are. I personally love faces with many features while it bores me terribly to portray those without them. When I was a boy one of my first jobs was to portray the faces of brides. My role, however, was to beautify them as much as possible. The brides were eventually delighted but I soon abandoned that kind of frustrating portraiture.