John Singer Sargent, celebrated portraitist, once said, "A portrait is a painting where something is wrong with the mouth."
The biggest issue of our day, after all the life-threatening ones are satisfied, is how do we represent ourselves? There's the "avatar" model in which the icon that we present of ourselves is our stand-in and we try to put the best produced one up front. Another model is a metaphorical one where the image is of an inner state, e.g. I have jaws like a dragon and eyes like a retired accountant. Finally, there is the the slightly charged, "magical realism" portrait in which there is some slight change to mar the glamour of the surface—see the theory of the grotesque as it relates to "Wolf in Wolf's Clothing" and "Breaking Bad"
