A grouping of small, expressive portraits by Kirsten Holt Beitler captures humor and personality through vivid color and theatrical gesture.

Not all photos should be paintings: landscape details that captivate in a photograph can look tedious in paint, and it’s really hard to make a toothy, smiling person look good in a painting (not everyone can be Franz Hals). Which is why there are so many bad paintings out there, from new or under-skilled painters trying to turn a favorite snapshot into “a work of art.” That’s not the case with Kirsten Holt Beitler, a Washington, Utah painter who seems to be able to bring the solidity and grace of Renaissance portraiture to the age of the selfie. Selfie and the Soul: An Exploration of Accidental Art in the Digital Age, on exhibit at the St. George Museum of Art, takes on the difficult task of translating everyday images—the kind that live and die on our phones—into portraits that feel both timely and timeless.

Portraiture in the Renaissance was a formal, deliberate act, with rich patrons framed by a windowsill or a velvet curtain. No smiling, just the careful attention to status and likeness—Renaissance ideals of beauty differed from our own, but it’s hard to imagine the hooked nose in Piero della Francesca’s portrait of Federico da Montefeltro was anything but true to life. Those paintings were frozen ideas of people, not moments in time. It took centuries before sitters began to look natural, to be caught mid-gesture, or even laughing and cavorting, in the case of Hals.

Now, with photography and social media, the pendulum has swung fully the other way: people are forever in motion, always performing for the camera, smiling on cue. A generation raised on selfies and communicating via images on a daily basis, may have more images of themselves than any in history, and yet those images rarely endure as anything more than digital debris. In Beitler’s hands, the casual photograph is reimagined as something more searching. The project began more than a decade ago when Beitler first got on Facebook and began commenting on images, “This would make a great painting.” Her subjects come from the endless scroll of the camera roll: a day at the beach, a father and child playing, the inevitable selfie, a new haircut, friends pressed close for a quick snap. Beitler leans into the awkward gesture, the in-between expression, the evidence of real life.

Everyday snapshots—vacation scenes, family moments, and playful gestures—become timeless through Kirsten Holt Beitler’s attentive brushwork.

Circular portraits by Kirsten Holt Beitler nod to Renaissance tondi while bringing contemporary wit and individuality to their subjects.

Across the gallery, her portraits hang in constellations and pairs—intimate, domestic affectionate. She paints the texture of our shared human world—self-aware, slightly absurd, occasionally tender. In one wall grouping, a series of small panels recall the look of a social-media grid: each image discrete, yet connected through color and gesture. Another shows two figures lying close together, painted from a bird’s-eye view—tender and vulnerable, as if the viewer has stumbled into a private moment. “Enjoy Your Stupid Life,” a portrait of an old man from a child’s-eye view, is marked by both dread and humor. By contrast, a pair of small portraits of partially masked women brings a moment of introspection. A group of circular portraits are playful and unexpected, their tondo format nodding to Renaissance precedents even as the expressions feel unmistakably modern. The overall tone of the exhibition is lighthearted, even humorous, yet moments of melancholy and reflection appear like pauses between laughter.

“Enjoy Your Stupid Life”

You’d have to know these people to say whether Beitler captures their likeness, but she captures something else—a shared humanness, the intimacy of family and friendship—and in so doing shows that this old medium can still stop time. In her hands, the disposable becomes contemplative, the fleeting, enduring. Few of us would hang a portrait of someone we don’t love or honor. Beitler’s paintings recognize that truth. They are less about who she is painting than about a simple reminder: every face, smiling or not, asks to be seen, and can be reflected in the mirror of the other.

Selfie and the Soul: An Exploration of Accidental Art in the Digital Age, St. George Museum of Art, St. George, through November 15.

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.