Portraits

After a longer delay than usual, my thoughts on the most recent episode of Bravo's Work of Art. Spoilers are included, but if you haven't seen it by now, you probably aren't going to.

The five remaining contestants were put on a train and went about 60 miles north of the city to a small town called Cold Spring. Each was given $200 to spend as needed in research and given the assignment to find someone local to become the subject of a portrait. They had a few hours to do whatever they could in town, then several hours back in their studio to make the actual work. On the surface it seems pretty simple, but as an artist who does occasionally work with portraits, I know that's not necessarily so.

The artists disperse on foot from the train station to see what they can find. Some literally knock on random doors, with no takers. Others wander into shops and stores. Young tries the strategy of talking to someone who he thinks would have knowledge of many people in town, but ends up wasting much of his brief time. From there he runs across an artist's studio/gallery with the painter at work, and uses his budget to commission a quick portrait of himself. While being painted, Young shoots many photos of the painter at work. Dusty meets a father and daughter, the girl reminding him a bit of his own daughter, and they agree to let him take some reference photos. Sara finds a firehouse with the firemen out front. She decided to do a piece about the senior fireman and his decades of volunteer service. Kymia discovers an antique shop and is intrigued by the couple who own and operate it. She buys a small music box that had played a role in couple's early dating history, and decides to base a painting of the pair on the box's surface decoration. Lola's choice is two men who run a coin shop, trading in antique coins and bills. She uses her budget to buy some sample of unusual old money. Then they all get back to the train and head to the studio.

The pieces done by Dusty and Kymia are probably the most literal, essentially representational images of the subjects. As the young girl mentioned a fondness for candy, Dusty decides to saturate the colors in the photo, blow it up, mount it in a box frame, and reproduce the colors in small candies (M&M's, Skittles). Even in progress he admits that it's pretty much the same process (with slightly different materials) as two pieces he's already done here. He comes up with an alternative idea, using little folded paper fortune telling devices, and Simon agrees. However, he can't get this done in time, so just finishes the candy piece. It's so last minute, that the glue isn't completely dry and candy regularly falls off the hung piece in the gallery. Kymia's painting at first looks like some cheesy cartoony double portrait, but viewers come to realize it captures the essence of the subjects in an odd way.

The the other artists get a little more complex with their pieces. Young edits the photos down to small details of his hired artist (eyes, hands, etc) and mounts dozens on thin planks of wood. After playing around with configurations, his piece is the commissioned painting of himself, with the mounted photo boards arranged near it. Sara produces a sort of diptych- an image of the fireman made by punching holes in a metal sheet, and a mass of small curled pieces of metal mounted as a wall sculpture, the tags smudged with something black, representing charred carbon from fires. Lola prints out enlargements of the fronts and backs of her old money and mounts them in sort of a tower formation. I understand her fascination with old money (it's one I share), but Simon questions how the piece is a portrait. The money ends up being half the work, which she accompanies with a long hand written letter to the men about how they are the most important historians in their community (?), and a tiny altered photo of one of them.

Something unusual is thrown into the mix- all of the subjects of the portraits are invited to come to the gallery show, where they can mix with the artists, viewers, and critics. All seem pleased with the resulting works, all positive images one way or another. And it turns out that it makes a difference in the judging. In his blog, Jerry Saltz admits that he was all set to move his darling Lola into the final round and dump Sara, but the firemen impressed him and in a befuddled state he switched his support on the two. It was in meeting Kymia's subjects that the judges realized how much sense her approach to the portrait made in relation to the subjects.

The judges uniformly decide that they like Kymia's painted portrait, despite being the most traditional piece, making her one of the final three. They all like the idea of Young commissioning a portrait and indicate that they would have preferred if he just showed that and not surrounded it with his own photos of the artist. Many online have since questioned the validity of using a piece he had no part in making as his entry in a competition about creating a portrait, but it has seemed all season that the judges have used a different set of rules for him from everyone else, and he is given the 2nd slot. The editors give us a clip of Lola complaining in the crit about the candy dropping off Dusty's piece over the course of the exhibition, but the judges actually think that adds to the piece. (I'm not sure I agree with them on that- it's not that it couldn't be part of a successful piece, it just doesn't seem relevant to the story) However, the similarity to previous work becomes the main issue and he is sent home. The judges seem to have finally lost patience with Lola doing another one of her random combination of ideas pieces. Having played the nudity card last week, all that's left for tonight is the breaking down crying during her crit routine. Despite all the regular judges still insisting she is potentially the best artist of the whole original group, she is also sent home. Although none of them particularly like the sculptural half of the piece, they like enough about the portrait half (and maybe her previous work) to give the last spot to Sara. As with last year, a long interval will have passed with the contestants working in their own studios, before next week's finale- three solo shows of new work in any medium or subject they like.

Now my story. The definition of a portrait played a factor in this episode. On the surface, any image of an individual reads as a portrait. For example, many times I have referred to my smoking figure as a portrait, but that would not be completely accurate as I often define it. The woman in the print looks a lot like the model who posed for it, but it's not about her as a person. It would have been about an aspect of the woman who inspired it, but she chose not to pose for it. Aspects of the model's experience were drawn on, but really the piece is about an archetype, which is why the piece has always been called 21st Century Employee in my mind, and not named after the depicted individual. A better example of what I consider a true portrait is shown at the top of this posting. The subject is a former co-worker who had occasionally helped me by posing for print projects. I invited her to the reception when one such piece was in a group show at the Newark Museum. She came and it was obvious that she was well along in pregnancy. Besides the opportunity to see herself on the museum wall, part of the reason she attended the reception was to inquire about having me do some kind of formal pregnancy portrait of her, inspired by something she saw on some cable show.

A few weeks later we spoke on the phone about thoughts she was having relating to the whole experience of expecting a child. The one thing that stuck out was that she mentioned having been adopted herself (if I had known that, I had forgotten that) and she had never had any contact with her birth family. Therefore, her first child would be her first opportunity to see the face of someone she was related to. Based on that I developed the idea- a double portrait, showing her in profile (emphasizing the large belly) in the foreground, while looking at her own face in the mirror (hand on belly), as if wondering about the face of the child to come. The calendar behind her shows the expected date (the baby came early, so I was lucky to get the session done in time). The frame of the mirror was based on one I saw in a local antique store. I added symbols of a patron saint for expectant mothers, and images of a chicken and an egg, based on the old riddle. Obviously mother comes before child, but she was seeking a connection back to her own parents before her. For the title of the piece I went with a Zen koan, "What did your face look like before your parents were born?" I'm sure that there are many possible Zen answers, but the one logical answer that I thought of was that it looked like your grandparents. Any of her baby's features that weren't hers or her husband's could be of her unknown ancestors. I was trying to tell a story about this one individual, considering past, present, and future in one image. She liked the idea, and was very happy with the results, so the portrait was successful to its most important audience.