Portrait of a Primate

Round 3
Image 1 - "Eyes Older Than Language" : 2.85
The title promises a gaze from before words existed, and the picture hands us a postcard from a sunny holiday. The chimp is lit like a studio headshot against a bright blue bay and green hills, with a faint smirk and neatly folded hands, so instead of something ancient looking back at us we get a friendly mascot posing for a travel brochure.

Image 2 - "Golden Gaze" : 3.40
A burst of colour that knows exactly where to put its fire: the orange mane blazes against a near-black ground, and the cool blue face sits inside it like a stone set in a flame. Yet it stays a very fine wildlife photograph rather than a portrait with something to say, because the upward look is aimed at nothing we can feel, and the image admires its sitter's fur more than it wonders what goes on behind those amber eyes.

Image 4 - "The Elder's Solitude" : 3.70
This one understands that a portrait is about the weather inside the sitter, and the gorilla's lowered sideways glance is heavy with it, painted in umber and smoke as if Rembrandt had been handed a silverback. The darkness is both its gift and its limit: the lower half of the body sinks into a brown fog with no edge or texture to hold on to, so the loneliness is announced by the face and then left with nowhere else on the canvas to live.

Image 3 - "Gaze of the Ancient Forest" : 3.95
The one picture in the round that asked what a portrait of a primate might be for, and answered with an icon. An orangutan sits wrapped in a red saint's mantle on a cracked wooden panel, ochre and flaking like a relic from a chapel wall, so the sitter becomes an elder of the forest, venerated in the manner humans keep for their own holy ancestors. The wit and the reverence arrive together and neither cancels the other: the calm, knowing eyes make it moving, the peeling panel makes it old, and the title lands because the wood itself is the forest. My winner.