As a portrait painter, I always have at least one other person besides me who’s looking forward to the completion of a painting. The subject acts as a deadline of sorts in that she-he makes every portrait especially exciting to complete.
Of course, there are more specific deadlines too. Completing works for a conceptual series is always easier if I already have a venue lined up for the exhibition. I never wait on securing a space before diving into my conceptual projects, but the moment when I do nail down the venue does mark a change in my attitude toward the work I am creating for the show.

But--subjects, clients, venues--none of these deadlines can compare to the motivational force that is a growling stomach or an unpaid bill. The looming shadow of a rent check due each month can have a way of paralyzing an artist, but there’s something infinitely worse about having one’s way paid. The vital-ness goes right out of the work if the artist doesn’t have to do it in order to live.
I make money with my art, so that I can have money to buy the fuel--supplies and materials as well as food and shelter!--to keep on making work. It may sound like an endless and dizzying spiral, but I am living proof that the spiral is not only sustainable but also mostly headed upwards!

I talk a lot about the value of being a working artist and specifically of doing commission work, because, as I see it, it’s the only way left for artists to avoid the unnatural vacuum that has been created at the heart of art today.

Read more...

Last weekend, I was, however, surprised to discover that there was an aspect of the art market that he doesn’t understand. He was talking about how the supply of art far outstrips the demand in this country, and he singled out households in the $40,000 to $80,000 annual income range as being particularly hesitant in the art-buying department. He admitted he doesn’t know why this demographic does not see the value of purchasing art, though it’s something he’s interested in exploring.

As I see it, this gap in this dealer/collector’s understanding of the art market comes from an overall misconception about the value of art. He believes that just because a person loves a work of art does not mean she-he will buy it. There needs to be one other element present for the sale to be certain. He argues that the potential buyer is more likely to fork over the cash if she-he believes that the work could, at some future time, be sold for a profit. In other words, he maintains that after love, investment is the only real driving force behind art purchases. When it comes to the middle class’s art-buying habits, I think he’s mistaken. And I can talk about that demographic’s relationship to art with some amount of expertise--they happen to be my largest client base.

Households in the $40,000 to $80,000 annual income range aren’t buying art because art created for the open market isn’t usually of interest to them. Simply put, if they’re going to spend a good amount of money, they want a custom job. They want art that is special…to them. This can mean commissioning a work (not necessarily a portrait) and being involved in that way in its inception, but it might also be as simple as buying art from an artist whom they’ve gotten to know or finding the one open-market piece that really speaks to them.
This demographic can’t afford the big and important works of art: that kind of special is ruled out for them. So they want a different kind of special. It’s probably not going to be “re-sell-able special,” but it’s definitely “cherish-it-forever special.”

Problem: lots of know-it-alls in the fine art community think that art that’s not created for the open market--art that’s NOT purely for art’s sake--is commercial and therefore less good. There’s this weird assumption that the artist working on commission is somehow nothing more than a skilled hand taking direct orders from the financial sponsor (especially if the work being created is a portrait). I’m sure that some artists do reduce themselves to little more than talented puppets, but I’ve never done so and, what’s more, I’ve only been asked to do so on one occasion in all the time I’ve been doing commission work. I’ve actually found that patrons are keen on the final product qualifying as art and understand that, for the work to do so, they must trust the artist's vision.

It’s strange really, when you think about it, this art-for-art’s-sake and art-for-patron’s-sake dichotomy, because, the way I see it, it neither has to be just one or the other, nor is it ever just one or the other! The artists creating art for the open market are still trying to sell their work (usually), so they do have patrons in mind to some degree. And the artists doing commission work are still making their art even if they have a specific patron in mind. And I would argue (and have argued) that making art for sale is a Very Good Thing for the work’s integrity, so, in a sense, commissioned work is more truly art than open-market art.

He Drives A Gold Corvette
2006
acrylic on bird’s eye
24 x 18 inches
(detail below)

Michael commissioned me when he was going into radiation therapy and knew he’d lose his impressive beard--a feature he’d had since he was in his twenties. He wanted to honor that beard with a portrait in case he never got to grow it back, and, I have to say, after meeting his beard I wanted to as well!

I’ve had movie stars and corporate bigwigs commission me, but I’ve also had plenty of people like Michael do payment plans with me in order to buy my art--my art of them.
The power of "special" should not be underestimated, especially in its ability to make art and the art market both vital and viable for artists and their patrons.

This World War II poster was not created to provide women with a positive image of what it was to be at work. Well before the War, many women were working outside of the home. The need for a double income was already a fact of American life in the late 19th century. Rosie was about making factory work more acceptable to homemakers and women who would otherwise be in clerical positions.* She wasn’t asking women to rethink their place in society: that’s a purely modern interpretation of this image. In 1942, Rosie just wanted women to participate in the less glamorous aspects of war production.

Raha The Riveter (Iranian-German-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
41 x 38 inches
(For more information about the making of this painting, visit this post.)

Raha has a good deal more on her plate than Rosie ever did. She forgoes the original meaning (and gesture) and embraces the modern understanding of Rosie while also taking it a step further, from female identity to national identity.

This image manages to insert itself into the viewer's consciousness, but only as the embodiment of the the United States. Yesterday's message (Army recruitment) has lost out to this old white man's imposing and memorable finger and expression. This Uncle Sam now represents how we see our government, like a demanding old codger of Western European descent who wants a cut of our earnings every April. Like a parental figure of sorts...? Definitely keeping an eye on us.

Chu Xam (Vietnamese-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas and eyelet
36 x 24 inches
(For more information about the making of this painting, visit this post.)

This painting hijacks the attributes of Uncle Sam along with his name--Chu Xam means Uncle Sam in Vietnamese--without taking up his stated request for your life or (or his implied one for) your money. Though the text in the resulting image is an order of sorts, this version of Uncle Sam isn't telling you what to do so much as flirting with you.

one of Shepard Fairley's many Barack Obama posters

These days, propaganda posters in the US are focused around the promotion of a real person, Barack Obama. Without getting into the politics of this year's Presidential race, I would like to note that these images have seared the likeness of the candidate juxtaposed with words like "hope" and "change" into our secular (and sometimes otherwise) souls with little attempt to engage us as thinking beings.
The proliferation of these images fascinates me. I wonder whether or not future generations will even remember our Obam-olatry (I suppose that depends, in part, on the outcome of the election). And, if they do, I can't wait to see how they will elevate our hypnotic brain trash to the level art.

___________________________________________________________________________

*For more information about the history of women in the workforce and the Rosie The Riveter effect, see Shauna B. Gluck’s Rosie The Riveter Revisited from 1987.
___________________________________________________________________________

It’s only with some digging that the truth about PaintYourLife.com comes out. The company provides a Painter’s Forum (accessible only through the FAQ section) where aspiring artists can ask PaintYourLife.com’s professionals technical questions. The forum doesn’t seem to be particularly popular, and one of the few posts questions the company’s ability to provide the service it does for such surprisingly low prices. The answer is a depressing commentary on the state of our world economy as well as on the way that some people view the work an artist does.

“PaintYourLife doesn’t use any computers or printers in order to paint a portrait, our artists paint only 100% handmade. the reason that our prices are low is because we own a studio in Asia and all our artists are highly talented in painting portraits, they can paint much faster than most painters in the western world.
“In general, artists don’t have stable orders and therefore they must charge a high price for each painting (because they can't know when will he get another painting order). PaintYourLife has many orders per month so each of our painters feel secure in having a stable work and therefore the price is lower than an independent artist.”

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. So why do I keep thinking about the company and what it does?

I guess that I’m just a sucker for “making special.” Though PaintYourLife.com is just one more case of uninspired craft being passed off as real art to the wider community, it at least has the customization factor. It’s not another Thomas-Kinkade Hallmark hotel-room cookie-cutter version of “art.” It’s your life that the company is painting. And I happen to think that there’s something to that. It’s true that detractors of portraiture in the fine art world can point to PaintYourLife.com as the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the genre, but at least the company is beginning to put value back into a certain kind of individuality that must be custom produced, if not original.

My hope is that, one day, we’ll all be our own brand: we won’t want anything that will make us look or feel like we come off the assembly line ourselves. But, until then, at least my man is his own brand. He asked me to paint his portrait on his hat.

Painting a portrait that is this small is usually difficult for me.

I prefer the wide open spaces of a large canvas!

But, at this point, I know David's face so well that the size of the portrait wasn't as much of an impediment.

The hat completed, a detail image of the portrait.

In some strange way, PaintYourLife.com is a kind of comfort to me. I'm happy that people still want painted portraits of themselves in their homes--even if they don’t want them badly enough to pay a slow, independent, Western artist! The genre may never gain the respect it deserves in elitist circles, but it's good to know that hanging a painted portrait (instead of just an enlarged photo) of oneself in one's home is as popular as ever in the United States.

With that in mind, when I’m painting the portrait of an infant, I avoid pinning down her-his features too carefully. I look at the subject’s face more whole-ly than I do when I’m looking at an adult face. There’s something about a child’s face that’s loose and too-alive for a portrait unless I focus on capturing that “too-alive-ness” instead of the specific features of the little person. By the same token, when I’m painting the portrait of an older person, I may still look at the subject’s whole face--and the way she-he moves and breathes--but I also get to relish the details!

I learned to make portraits by looking to my elders. I worked at a retirement home for a few years in high school, and it was during that time that I also discovered how to draw faces. I would sit and talk with residents, following their lines as we chatted and capturing their likenesses as I came to understand how faces work.
Before I found this amazing world of faces to teach me, I was drawing from photos of friends or of air-brushed magazine models, which are as difficult to maneuver as babies' faces since they have had all their details glossed over. When a face is full of character (and wrinkles!) it’s easy to see how all the parts relate.

Nurturing Important Relationships
2007
acrylic on panel
24 x 24 inches
(detail below)

In this portrait of a ten-week-old girl, I thought of her face as masses--forehead, cheeks, her whole head--more than features since it was the placement of her eyes, nose, and mouth that made her likeness more than the precise shapes of those features.

After Another Year
2007
acrylic on bird’s eye
30 x 30 inches
(detail below)

The subject of this portrait is ninety years old, and she gave me plenty of character to fasten my eyes and brushes on. I wasn’t worried I’d lose myself in the masses of her face: her wrinkles helped me keep it all together.

I much prefer working on portraits of older subjects. There’s a certain laziness to this partiality since older faces are a map of terrain where the roads are already paved--so to speak! But then, too, with the likeness of an older person, there’s the challenge of conveying an entire life’s worth of character with paint, and that's the sort of thing I love to do. After all, a proper portrait is only as good as its subject!

Of course, not everyone agrees with me. Here are some other definitions of art and why I think they all point back to revolution.

1. Art is a profound human exercise or experience.
I agree, but what makes the exercise or experience “profound” besides its ability to cause some kind of revolution?

2. Art is a reflection of what it is to be a human.
And what is it to be human if not to be changing and growing at every moment?

3. Art is about appreciating what is already there but has somehow been overlooked in our everyday busy-ness.
So, in other words, art causes a paradigm shift? That qualifies as change in my book.

4. Art is an attempt to manifest or make material the profundity of simple human gestures, like crossing one's legs or frowning in concentration.
Please refer to definition and argument #3.

5. Art is meant to provide recreation or therapy for the artist.
This means that art gives the artist something to do, which is a change from having nothing to do or from doing something else. And the goal of therapy is a change in how one sees oneself, isn’t it?

6. Art allows the artist to enjoy the satisfaction of creating something.
This is related to definition #5. They’re both very artist-centric and unfortunate* ways of looking at art. But, again, there’s a state change from unsatisfied to satisfied, so it’s still about revolution (albeit a rather self-absorbed kind).

7. Art is for relaxation.
This definition implies that the artist wasn’t relaxed before she-he started making the work or that the audience wasn’t relaxed before viewing the piece. Going from not relaxed to relaxed is a state change.

8. Art is for spreading information.
Yes, art is a medium--a go-between--but this doesn’t explain why the artist chooses to communicate (through art or through any other means), or why the audience agrees to engage with the work and receive that information. I would argue that the artist is trying to create a change for the viewer by giving them certain information, and the viewer looks at art because she-we wants that change.

9. Art is meant to educate.
Please refer to definition #8: spreading information is educating. Learning new things always causes paradigm shifts.

10. Art helps to convey the artist’s feelings to others.
Please refer to definition #8: emotions are just one kind of information.

11. Art is meant to delight or to amuse.
Helping the viewer (or even the artist) go from being neutral or annoyed to being happy is changing her-his state.

12. Art should be sexy or make the artist sexy.
The audience is more likely to engage with a sexy object or person and, therefore, to be changed by the work that has sexiness associated with it.

13. Art makes special.
This is one of my favorite definitions of art, but I still don’t think it’s the root meaning of art. It comes from the anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake’s book Homo Aestheticus. It’s a two-pronged definition:
----- a) Art celebrates the importance of its subject. It makes the subject special since the subject is worthy of being made into art.
----- b) The decoration or fine-crafting of an everyday object is art in that the artifact is now marked as special in the extra care that has gone into its creation.
Both of these kinds of “making special” also happen to be revolutions, of sorts. If human (a), the subject that is “made special” in art feels special, and, if inanimate (b), the decorated object is reconceived by the audience, a version of definition #3. The revolution associated with the well-made object is of the most profound kind: it’s the difference between using an ugly functional thing and a beautiful one.

14. Art will NEVER be about causing change. The “artist as social critic” concept failed in 1937, when Picasso painted Guernica. Neither Guernica nor a million Guernica-like paintings have ever even slowed down a war for a second, let alone stopped one.
Okay, so maybe the revolutions that art can cause are not far-reaching. Maybe art can only function in the small picture. But is it really so wrong to try to make art that could effect more universal change?

15. Art is SUBJECTIVE. Pease calm down.
I’m glad I get excited about things like what I see as the over-arching definition of art. And, I agree, art is subjective: it's subjectively causing change! Art always makes revolution, but each person can word the definition whichever way she-he sees fit.

What's your preferred way of talking about revolution?

___________________________________________________________________________

*Art isn’t really art until it’s seen by an audience. Defining art based solely on what the artist gets out of it is incomplete and self-important way of looking at things. ___________________________________________________________________________

My father gave me my first camera when I was sixteen years old, a Pentax ME with a complete set of lenses. I promptly named the camera George and, for a few years, George and I were inseparable. Last year, I gave in to the changing world and bought George Junior, a digital SLR. My new camera has reinvigorated my photo-taking self, and I’m reminded of how important a camera can be for keeping my eye sharp.

It helps me to see the details I might otherwise overlook, and, too, it teaches me to create a composition quickly, at the click of a shutter! I take many photos of one subject in many different ways and, with some amount of trial and error, I determine the best composition for the final image. I can apply these formal discoveries to my paintings.

I'm a forest-hiker and beach-walker, and that's where I usually find my eye-sharpening subjects.

Plants are fairly still, allowing me to try multiple compositions without movement and facial expressions being factors in the image.

I can pay more attention to the background when framing these photos.

At the same time, plants and other finds made on a walk are not in-studio set-ups. Instead, they are doing their thing and I get to figure out how to react to them with my camera. They give me a problem to solve: infinitely more instructive than me giving myself a problem to solve.

Several people together allow me a similar kind of freedom. When I am photographing and interviewing one person alone, I’m concentrating on at least two things at once--manipulating both the camera and the atmosphere. I have to take pictures and, at the same time, help the subjects forget (as much as possible!) that the camera exists.
If there’s more than one person, the subjects can interact, and, at the very least, they can just be--like flowers and plants--allowing me to react to them with my camera.

Here I was photographing two of my favorite subjects, Megh and this dashing fellow, Jesse.

I mean to make a You Bag for Jesse so I needed some current images of him.

Megh was kind enough to keep him talking while I snapped away, and the synergy of the three of us plus camera came up with some pretty outrageous and lovely moments.

Or, I mean, it is my portrait, but I’m not the subject. I painted it. When someone talks about their portrait it’s usually of them and not by them.
Who has more right to feel possessive a portrait? The artist who is its author, or the subject who is, in a sense, its other author?

When clients or their friends go on and on about how much they love a portrait that I painted, my response is always the same. I tell them “it’s the subject.” It may seem like a canned compliment, but I mean it every time. For obvious reasons, I wouldn’t be able to create any of my portraits without someone to sit for them, but it’s more than that too. An artist needs a face and all the personhood that goes along with it to make a likeness, and that who-ness isn’t created overnight. In a good portrait, the subject’s contribution to the piece should be as apparent as they artist’s.

Maybe that’s why when someone says “my portrait,” it’s usually assumed that it’s of them and not by them. As the sometimes-brilliant Richard Brilliant writes in his 1991 book Portraiture: “there is great difficulty in thinking about pictures, even portraits by great artists, as art and not thinking about them primarily as something else, the person represented.”
Brilliant implies that not only does the portrait not belong to its painter, but that it’s not even art! This isn't going to turn into me ranting about portraiture’s beleaguered status again, I promise! But Brilliant's logic does add a whole new facet to the problem. He is essentially saying that portraiture transcends the artifice of art. It is its subject--it’s ALIVE!

I like to think that the one thing that might most hold portraiture back in its struggle to qualify as fine art is also what makes it so great. A portrait has a real and vital life away from the artist, and that’s all any artist could ever want for their work.

Gavin Shettler (Portland Art Center)
2003
acrylic on canvas
48 x 34 inches

This piece is, in a way, one of my most admired portraits, but its popularity has nothing to do with me. It's all about the subject. Gavin Shettler is a curator here in Portland. His movings and shakings tend to be fodder for art blogs, and, looking to add a little color to their posts, many writers use this image. I am pleased for my work to have this kind of exposure, but only when I'm given credit for it.
A couple of years ago, a fellow artist lifted an image of this portrait from my portfolio site and published it on his blog for a major newspaper without mentioning me. I thought that, being an artist himself, the blogger would understand the value of intellectual property, but, through an email conversation, he revealed that he did not consider my work worthy of credit. Though he didn't put it quite this way, I gather that he felt that this portrait belonged more to Shettler than to me.

Already in 2005 as I began to gather subjects for my own special kind of Apple Pie, I had it in mind to find a Russian-American subject to play Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon had to make an appearance in the series, and it followed naturally that someone with Russian origins should fill that role since the US would never have made it to the moon in the 1960s without the fierce competition of the USSR.

Of course, wanting a Russian-American participant and having one are two different things. I’d sent out queries to all the Russian-American associations and businesses in town: no one was biting. I was at the stage in my subject-search that I like to call “ask every last person you meet.” In my experience, this method of finding a participant is never successful until I become tired of asking strangers strange questions. That’s when the subject usually falls in my lap…!
And that’s how it worked with Alex, my Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong.

I decided to bring elements of Marc Chagall’s work into my portrait of Alex as Armstrong because, like the subject, the artist was a Russian Jew who lived much of his life outside of Russia. And too, there is a distinct lack of gravity in Chagall’s work--startling when you consider that the man was painting pre- Space Race.
In these compositional sketches, I hadn't yet decided to focus on Chagall's I And The Village specifically. I was toying with many different ways of presenting the same visual information.

Marc Chagall’s I And The Village 1911

In doing further research on Chagall and his oeuvre, I discovered what a good match he was for my painting. His name, a Jewish one, sounds like the Russian word for “he/you/I walked in a striding step.” Chagall often represented this action as a figure taking a step on an upward diagonal. He would also sign his name in Hebrew script but right-to-left (as Russian is written) near the figure.* What better reference for a painting that is, in part, about a singular man and his enormously important moment? One small--but striding!--step for a man.
The American flag on the moon has always struck me as a peculiarly undignified and childish gesture. I decided to put a footprint on the flag on my moon because it always seemed to me like that was more the point of the leaving the planet: humanity instead of nationality.

Getting started. Early on the footprint on the flag was a booted one, like those in the pictures of moon dust. I also had the headset all wrong and I wouldn't solve this problem until much later on in the process.

Establishing colors.

Layering.

Here, I moved the flag and added an element while also finally adjusting the headset to fit on Alex's head.

When I was a kid, my father bought my mother a Fisher Pen. This writing utensil was specially designed to work without gravity, useful for writing on the ceiling or on the moon and, as it turns out, for saving the whole moon mission.
The Fisher Pen Company spent millions of dollars developing the pen, only to discover that the Russians had done the old “work around.” They were using pencils to write in zero-gravity! Practical thinking, but Armstrong wouldn’t have returned to tell his tale without the Zero Gravity Pen. The story goes that, exiting the lunar landing module, either Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin brushed the ignition switch with his bulky space suit, breaking off the toggle. In order to keep the lunar module’s weight down, the mission was without tools for even such minor repairs. They did, however, have one very expensive pen for logging incidents. On Houston’s orders, they jammed the Fisher Pen into the ignition and used it as a toggle to flip the switch. The pen was mightier than the pencil!
The official NASA history likes to point out that the Russians subsequently bought a hundred Zero Gravity Pens for use in its space missions.

This pen's story had to be included in the painting and it was here that I figured out where: I added a patch to the shoulder of my Cosmonaut's suit.

I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong (Russian-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 inches

detail image of I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong

detail image of I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong

____________________________________________________________________________

*For more information about Marc Chagall and his oeuvre, see Benjamin Harshaw's Marc Chagall And The Lost Jewish World from 2006.
____________________________________________________________________________

I have to admit it: though I may get frustrated by portraiture’s low status in fine art circles, I understand where it comes from.
To be sure, humans are fascinated by faces and, specifically, the faces of other humans. It’s a function of being social animals, and also a self-defense mechanism. Another person’s face gives us a lot of information about her-his general health and disposition towards us, invaluable information when judging whether or not another can or will harm us. But while we like faces so well that we see them everywhere--in cloud shapes and electrical outlets--there is something we like still more than a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth, and, consequently, still more than a straight portrait. And that’s a storied face.

By combining narrative with a human face, a visual artist turns her-his viewers’ self-defensive curiosity about another person into the possibility of a connection. Faces may be how we communicate certain basic information, but it is through story that we actually relate to one another. By this logic, the painting of a face or full figure that tells a story is rightfully at the top of the “hierarchy of genres.” And, in the 17th century, certain stories were rated more important than others, making history painting the reigning champion of that time. That said, in the modern, relativistic world, the game has changed, and more intimate and small-picture stories have replaced history, the Bible, and Greek mythology as principal source material.

Today, the most obvious kind of storied face, and maybe the kind with the broadest appeal, are those belonging to celebrities. Famous people’s faces always have a story attached to them, even if it’s one gleaned from the tabloids. And, in the case of Hollywood actors, we may associate their faces with the roles they’ve played, with their movie-stories. It’s the narratives that go along with these icons’ faces--narratives which almost everyone knows--that make them attractive. The stories behind the faces (more than simply the faces) lead us to plaster our teenage bedrooms with enormous posters of them.
And it’s the very same thing that makes the faces of loved ones so pleasing. In this case, the stories we tell ourselves about the subjects are personal ones: they are our own stories since our loved ones are part of our private narratives. While we may like a portrait of our own mother, we don't necessarily want our neighbor’s mother staring down at us from over our mantelpiece. That’s because we have no stories associated with her. Her face may be interesting on some level, but it doesn’t connect to us without a story.

And this was the genius of those 18th century British artists who invented allegorical portraiture. Their motivation may have been a far more practical one--capitalizing on portraiture’s inherent profitability while retaining some kind of intellectual cachet by visualizing literature and other cultural stories like history painters--but the end result is a combination to rival peanut butter and jelly! Faces and stories are meant to be together.

For Love AND Money
2005
acrylic on canvas patchwork
48 x 34 inches

This self-portrait may connect with you if you know me, and, more so, if you knew my grandfather and how he would make this face all the time.

Once Was My Father's Hero
2007
acrylic on twill
17 x 13 inches

This one could have a better chance at connecting with you since there are more background elements than in For Love AND Money. That said, those added access points are a bit obscure. It would help if you had visited my parents’ house and recognized in those shapes the most prominent feature from their home, an octagonal window.

Liberty (French-American)
2007
acrylic on linen
42 x 19 inches
(For more information about the making of this painting, visit this post.)

Unlike the previous two, this portrait immediately has many readings, associated with either Lady Liberty or myself (the subject). Even if you don't know me, it's clear that the Statue has non-generic features and a livelier expression in this version. You would probably wonder why Liberty has had a facelift and that might bring into focus the fact that she isn't carrying a torch in this image.
In other words, with this portrait, it doesn't matter whether or not you know a thing about me (the sitter), because you probably know something about the American icon with which I'm combined. Of the three paintings here, this one is the strongest in the sense that it is the most able to tell a story.

In Changing Perceptions from 1999, the art historian Elizabeth Cayzer describes an artist who paints portraits for clients as “chained to the treadmill of commissioned portraiture.” With her book, she intends to give a full survey of 20th century British portraiture,** but she purposefully focuses on artists who “are ‘occasional’ portraitists--those who have not had to rely on finding clients in order to make a living” because those who do so are repetitive hacks. I’m paraphrasing that last bit, but without altering Cayzer’s tone.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, outside that stuffy academic bubble, making a living with one’s work is a very good thing for so many reasons. Money is a vital fuel for most of us (who aren't financially supported by someone else), and whatever we do for a living is probably what we’ll do most of--in order to feed ourselves. So if it’s art that we do for money, we’ll be doing a lot of it and we’ll probably have to get better at it as we go. It’s really too bad that a handful of portraitists who secretly despised commission work and lacked imagination have given the whole genre a bad name.

But, in 18th century Britain, a few artists figured out how to make money from portraiture without losing too much intellectual credibility. They invented allegorical portraiture, an astute combination of the money-making possibilities of portraiture and the reputation-building properties of history painting.* These portraits unite a sitter’s likeness with the attributes of a character from Greek mythology, the Bible, or history. The paintings were often titled something like Lady So-And-So As Such-And-Such.*** 

The Next President Of The United States (African American)
2007
acrylic on denim
34 x 31 inches
(For more information about the making of this painting, visit this post.)

I could very well have titled this painting Chandra As The Next President.

Amazigh Gothic (Algerian-American)
2008
acrylic on panel
30 x 25 inches
(For more information about the making of this painting, visit this post.)

This one could have been Taous And Cherif As American Gothic.

I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong (Russian-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 inches

And finally, this one might have been titled Alex As Neil Armstrong.

These three paintings all come from Apple Pie, a series in allegorical portraiture. I’m following those British artists’ lead and helping portraiture to stake its rightful claim in a new hierarchy of genres!
___________________________________________________________________________

*The Art academies of 17th century Europe considered the genre of history painting the highest intellectual achievement for an artist since he was giving mythology and history a visual presence instead of simply translating nature into paint. For more information about the Art Academies, their hierarchy of genres, and allegorical portraiture, see Gender And Art, edited by Gill Perry, 1999.
**It's implied in the subtitle of the book: Milestones In Twentieth-Century British Portraiture.
***The models of allegorical portraits tended to be women, since ladies didn’t have careers or personalities back then, making it difficult for an artist to produce an interesting portrait without adding a layer of meaning.
___________________________________________________________________________

Long before the camera and its progeny, Modernism, spat on verisimilitude in painting, the Art Academies had discredited portraiture. The special irony of the genre is that, though it can’t seem to earn respect in elitist circles, everyone is flattered to be a model.

I first caught a glimpse of portraiture’s questioned status at university, in a painting class. Having observed my propensity for portraiture, the professor suggested that I instead use a face as a “happening” for my paintings, a departure point and no more. It was irrelevant whether or not I managed to create a faithful likeness: the finished piece needed only to be a solid work of art. At the time, I couldn’t see why it had to be either a portrait or art, instead of both, but I soon discovered what my professor meant.

The “hierarchy of genres” was explicitly established in the 17th century, but, before the various Art Academies of Europe had named history painting top genre, portraiture (along with landscape and still life) was relegated to a lower status. According to the logic of the time, an artist had to be a visionary in order to create a history painting. His* intellectual achievement was in imagining mythology and history in a visual way--no small task. Meanwhile, the mimetic genres (portraiture, landscape, and still life) did not require the artist to be creative. All she-he had to do was copy from nature.**

In point of fact, this aspect portraiture--referentiality--was and is believed to restrict the artist. Art historian Jean Alazard says in his 1948 book The Florentine Portrait, “the personality of the painter is limited to a certain extent by the very existence of the model whose essential features at least must be rendered.” It was this bias against painting a proper likeness that my professor was trying to warn me about. Clearly, he failed!

I think it unfortunate that Alazard and my professor, among many others, view the challenges of actually capturing a likeness in a negative light. When I look at figurative work, as opposed to the portrait of an individual, I’m usually disappointed by its unfinished, flat humanity. I feel like the artist hasn’t pushed her-him self enough because she-he didn’t have anything to strive towards--like, for example, an individual likeness. Then again, maybe I’m just a sucker for a promise of truth...but, if that's the case, I'm not the only one!

We’ve recently suffered a rash of faux memoirs, where fiction writers are bribed by their publishers to put their stories forward as real-life experiences. The publishers are anxious to capitalize on that certain je-ne-sais-quoi which also leads filmmakers to introduce their movies with the phrase “based on a true story.” And it’s the same quality that differentiates a painted portrait from a figurative work: the power of a real person’s self.

Patern Kervinio
2001
acrylic on canvas
30 x 24 inches
(detail below)

While my professor was telling me to give up likeness, I was busy painting and drawing portraits like this one, of my grandfather. When I showed this particular one in an exhibition of student work, the same university vice president who, two years later, bought out my thesis exhibit wanted to purchase it for his personal collection. I'd already promised the painting to my mother, so there was no question of selling it, but I was intrigued by this stranger's desire to possess a painting of my grandfather. He said he saw his own grandfather in it, not in the likeness but in the mood and feel. That's when I learned that the intimately individual can be universal.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Women were forbidden from creating in this taxing genre.
**For more information about the Art Academies and their “hierarchy of genres,” see Gender And Art, edited by Gill Perry, 1999.
___________________________________________________________________________

My view book is a small black binder (the simple, inexpensive, vinyl-covered kind) with captioned images printed on card stock.

I started my website when I was still in school, and, while it has changed quite a bit over the years, the basic layout and scheme remains the same...I'm not terribly imaginative that way! Still, the site serves its purpose. My only regret is that, to this day, I am mostly dependent on the WYSIWYG editor that my university promoted in its web design class: I wish I had learned to hand-code html from the beginning.

3) Learn to love writing artist statements. And I say statements, plural. The idea that your entire oeuvre has to fit into one elegant and inviting paragraph is nonsense. You should know what your oeuvre as a whole is about and be able to sum it up in a sentence or two in order to be able to make work purposefully, but you don't need to announce it to everyone. After all, if you have to explain to your audience what your art means, then your work isn't doing what it's supposed to anyway.
I write separate artist statements for each series I create. I view them as one more piece of art, no more or less important the painted works. With them, I aim to give the audience more access points into the images and concepts.

4) Forget grant-writing. When I was starting out, I was on the fence about granting bodies. I liked the idea of being recognized for my work in a financial but strictly non-commercial way, but I also had a need to do my thing without feeling beholden to anyone (I am a neurotic DIYer). That said, I did end up applying for a grant in 2005. I was rejected and it made me realize that I was misdirecting my energy.
What an artist needs, first and foremost, is attention, not grant money. Recognition in the press will lead to all sorts of good things, including awards, so press releases are the place to focus writing efforts. Besides being the only way to get reviewed, announcements are an ideal way to practice writing about your work in an engaging--and to the point!--manner. Show journalists and critics how easy and/or vital it would be to write about your series; make them want to tell the story of your work.

My father quite likes this painting. He is a big fan of our first President, so he was happy that I referenced Washington with this image. That said, upon seeing the completed portrait, he asked me why I had combined a Native American's likeness with George Washington's. I replied, "does it make more sense if I tell you the painting is called First American?" He laughed and nodded thoughtfully, "yes."

I invited Christine, the subject of this portrait, to participate in Apple Pie when I discovered that she is Cree and Cowlitz Indian. I explained to her that most of the subjects in the series are immigrants and the children of immigrants, but that I needed two other types of Americans to round out my series about the American experience. I needed someone whose ancestors had not chosen to come here and someone whose family had been in the Americas since well before the Vikings or Columbus discovered the continent. She agreed to represent the Native American aspect of the American experience in Apple Pie.

When I asked Christine if she would allow me to combine her likeness with George Washington's, I knew I was asking a lot of a near stranger. As Christine herself put it, I was asking her to "inhabit the enemy." Despite her reservations, she understood what the juxtaposition would mean and agreed.

Originally, I was drawn to this expression. My work as a whole tends to be playful and this look is more in keeping with my style, but I decided against it for reasons that now seem obvious. It simply does not convey the proper feeling for a painting questioning who the real first American is.

I wanted to include the seasonal cycle of the cherry tree in the painting as a reference to the myth that Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree. This composition looked good enough in black and white...

...but when I translated it into color for this painting, the background overwhelmed the figure. In this image, I have already painted over all the busy-ness in the background. The portrait remained in this state for eight months while I sorted out what I wanted to do with it.

Last winter, I happened to pick up Jay Griffiths' book A Sideways Look At Time. It made me realize that I couldn't adequately represent the cycle of the seasons on a rectangular canvas. I needed a circular frame.

I hunted high and low for a tondo, and finally found this fairly substantial one (35 inches in diameter).

To see more of the making of First American, please go here.

For the portrait of Chandra as the next President, I decided to combine her likeness with elements of the Presidential seal.

In this initial sketch, the eagle seems to be threatening her with the arrows and doing it in an understated sort of way too! It's as if this bird doesn't want anyone to notice that he has the President in a vulnerable place.

In this sketch, it looks like the eagle is protecting Chandra. While that's an improvement over threatening her, it was't quite what I wanted either.

Here it looks more like Chandra and the eagle are on the same team. I created the final painting based on this sketch.

The Next President (African American)
2007
acrylic on denim
34 x 31 inches

detail of The Next President
Another factor in my decision to paint Chandra as the next President is that, unlike most of the other subjects in the series, Chandra qualifies to be President because she was born in the United States.

detail of The Next President
During our interview, Chandra said that she never gets to be just a person: her sex and race are always a part of the way she is treated. In a way, politicians, and specifically the President, are most able to understand this. Once in office (or even during the electoral race), they don't get to be just people. They are forced to be--to represent--so much more than themselves.

detail of The Next President
I included this cotton flower in Chandra's lapel as a reference to her heritage and to the foundations of our country. The portrait is painted on denim, still the all-American favorite--and a product made from cotton.