Fifteen Nearly Identical Portraits: Portfolio Selection and an Honest Statement

The candidate is reasoning from the number of available slots instead of from the assessment criteria. The portfolio is not an inventory; it is an argument, and the argument has to answer 'what were you investigating, and how did the work develop?' Fifteen near-identical heads answer a different question - 'can you render a face in charcoal?' - and they answer it fifteen times, which weakens rather than strengthens the case.

The selection principle is: enough to establish the sustained investigation, then enough variety to show it was extended. A sequence of roughly five charcoal heads is sufficient to establish a series and to show progression; retaining a few allows the assessor to see consistency without repetition. The five gouache studies are high value, because they show observation of a changing phenomenon rather than a copied photograph, and they connect the head to a colour question. The three ink figures show a different medium, a different subject and speed. Two or three sketchbook pages show the process, the ten-minute drawings and the failures, which is exactly what 'reflection on process' means.

A workable 13-sheet sequence: sketchbook pages first (context and process), then the gouache colour series (question), then three or four charcoal heads (deepening), then the ink figures (range and observation from life), then one large resolved charcoal head as the final statement, so the portfolio closes on the strongest single work.

The risk must be named honestly: charcoals first would read as a wall of sameness, and cutting ten finished works feels like discarding effort. The examiner is not measuring effort, and a repeated work adds nothing that one instance has not already shown.

The draft fails because it could be attached to any twenty portfolios. 'Identity and emotion' names a theme with no object, 'light and shadow' names a device that every drawing uses, and neither sentence makes a claim that could be shown to be true or false of this candidate's work. It is not dishonest - it is empty.

A defensible statement makes three moves: it names a question actually present in the work, it names the method used to pursue it, and it acknowledges what was not resolved.

A rewritten version: 'I began this project making charcoal heads from photographs, until I noticed that I was drawing the photograph's lighting rather than the head. The gouache series on one head under five different light conditions was an attempt to fix that: my question became how much of a face is lighting and how much is structure. I kept the charcoal heads, but made them as a single group with one tonal approach so the gouache work could be read against them. The ink figures in the yard were me returning to observation from life and to speed. I have not resolved how to keep the energy of the ten-minute drawings inside the slower charcoal work, and the final head is my first attempt at it.'

Why it survives a viva: every claim is checkable against a sheet in the portfolio, the failure is stated and is the honest reason for the remaining work, and no sentence depends on vocabulary the candidate could not explain. If asked 'why gouache?', the candidate has a reason - it is the only medium here that could restate the same form five times quickly.

The candidate's charcoal heads and the ink figure studies almost certainly have visible ancestors, and the honest way to handle that is to say what was borrowed and what was changed. An examiner penalises two things, not the same thing: unacknowledged imitation - work that restates a known approach without any visible transformation - and fabricated attribution, where a candidate claims a source they cannot locate or describe.

The correct handling is comparative and specific. If the candidate's approach to heads derives from a known drawing tradition, the statement or a sketchbook note should say which aspect was taken - a way of blocking in the head, a use of erasure, a division of the face into planes - and then show what the candidate did differently: the gouache repetition, the change from photograph to life, the aggressive speed of the yard drawings. That is the difference between influence and pastiche, and it is demonstrable on the page.

What must be avoided: name-dropping an artist whose work the candidate has not looked at closely, and claiming originality for a device that is a standard convention. If the candidate genuinely cannot identify a source, the correct entry is a description of the device and where it was seen, not an invented name.

A strong final move in the viva: point to the specific sheet where the borrowed device was tested and say what happened when it was applied to the candidate's own subject. That converts a defensive admission into evidence of critical analysis, which is what the criterion rewards.