30X50: 30 portraits by age 50

Though I have dabbled in other types of art (and plan to dabble more), I am primarily a portrait painter. I paint people. In these portraits, I hope that in some way I am fulfilling Mark Rothko’s recipe for a work of art: I hope that my portraits include “a clear preoccupation with death, sensuality, tension, irony, wit, chance, and hope”. Aside from this, I believe that another part of what makes a portrait artist successful is being prolific. I look to Alice Neel who seems to have painted legion; it is as though you can search for years through her work in museums and online and still always come across someone she painted whom you have never met. With this understanding, I set a goal for myself to select and complete thirty portraits by the time I turn 50 (which will happen on September 26th of 2021—very soon). Though I have way more than thirty portraits in my portfolio, some I do not consider successful (through no fault of the sitter), others are repeat sitters, and some I simply do not wish to include here. At this writing, I have 26 (having just completed portrait # 26 yesterday) which means I have 4 more to go and less than a month to complete them (to my satisfaction). Under each portrait I will include an anecdote from the sitting. If you are one of my models—don’t worry—I’m saving all the juicy stuff you shared with me for the book!

“Tony” I painted this in the Lower East Side studio that I have through Artist Alliance Inc. Tony is a friend of over 20 years. We ate just before the sitting with two glasses of wine. For an hour during lunch, we caught up and, as a result of exhausting the conversation, being full, and two glasses of wine, Tony kept falling asleep while I painted him. You can see the struggle in his eyes to stay awake.

“Ed” This may have been the first portrait I did outside of my own Queens apartment. I traveled on the subway with this 30X40 canvas and a gym bag of brushes, paints, and turpentine to paint Ed in his Bronx apartment. At the time he was still living with an ex who silently walked back and forth behind me now and again as I painted Ed. I was lucky to catch Ed’s cat, Tux, in a few quick strokes when he jumped onto the scratching post and peered down at his human. Ed owns this portrait.

“Toby” This was done at Toby’s Harlem apartment. I originally met Toby in a Starbucks across the street from his apartment and 4 blocks from the school I teach in. We became fast friends but it took awhile for Toby to become comfortable enough to sit for me. This is the second of three portraits I did of him and the one I like the best because he let his hair go gray and he wore the leather jacket with the black beads which I loved. It was Toby who looked at me one day and said “what are you going to do with all the portraits you’re painting? Why don’t you get an MFA and take this somewhere”? So I did. Thanks Toby!

“Lorenzo”. Lorenzo is another friend of over 20 years and I did this in my Queens apartment while he was visiting NYC from the Philippines. Knowing how restless Lorenzo can get, I put a movie on for him (“Shin Godzilla”). He is wearing a robe I bought when he and I taught English together in South Korea.

“Caleb” I had a wonderful group of students who remained close to me after they graduated. Caleb is one of that group. I painted Caleb several times. This portrait was done in my Queens apartment. Always svelte in high school, Caleb had already been to college at the time of this sitting and had already gained his “Freshman 15”. So I had him lie on his stomach while he watched a movie and I painted. He quickly became one of my best models: patient, still, and always emitting good energy.

“Ouli” I was watching Toby’s Harlem apartment and babysitting his dog when Ouli came to sit for me there. Ouli is another of the students who I remained close with after graduation. I asked her to wear the pantsuit that she wore for the prom. Since this portrait was done, Ouli has had her breasts removed and now goes by the pronouns “them/they”. I have painted another portrait of her shirtless after her breast-removal but this, to me, is the superior portrait. Not because of the state of their body but because of the color and composition.

“John” Of all the students I remained close with, John was the closest to a son I ever had. I often think about the sexual tension inherent in a teacher painting a former student topless and I think there is something to that tension that comes through in the portrait. Not tension between John and myself: my relationship with my students is never sexual in nature, but the tension of the act of having a former student (or just a younger person) even partially nude sitting for a portrait. Or the tension inherent in Alice Neel’s portrait of her young daughter, Isabetta, completely nude. There is a bot of confrontation in it: A confronting of social norms for art’s sake. This was also done in my Queens apartment with a katana that I got from a street market in Chelsea.

“Dionne” In the portraits done in my apartment, you will usually see the wine colored futon, the brown and white Mexican blanket and this rug. Dionne was a friend I made at Hunter College. She started studying dance and, when I asked her to sit for me, she said she had a tutu which I thought would make a great outfit for a sitting. However, i was imagining a big fluffy tutu and not this slip-like garment. Still, it is one of my favorite portraits because of Dionne being surrounded by colorful geometric patterns. Afterwards, she gave me half an edibles gummi bear. While we had dinner at a restaurant around the corner, I had to fight the urge to tell Dionne that I could not move and then try to walk in a straight line as I walked her back to the train station. When i got back to my apartment, I lay on the floor listening to what seemed like the longest song in human history.

“Barbra Herr” Transgender artist and activist, Barbra Herr and I have been friends for over 17 years but getting her to sit for me was impossibly difficult. There were many hits and misses but when she finally acquiesced I took this large canvas on the train to The Bronx where she was living at the time. When I travel, I usually do not bring an easel so I have to find somewhere in my model’s apartment to prop up the canvas. I asked Barbra to wear very little makeup. When she sat with the white and black dress, I knew we needed some more color so she rummaged through her closet and pulled out the green scarf. She asked me not to include the radiator and I said I would not but painted it in later at home. We talked a lot as we always do. I remember that one thing we talked about was our mutual disdain for the TV show “POSE” but how we dared not to make that public for fear of offending its many fans who believe it is an important show for capturing Black and Brown gay life in the 80’s.

“Michelle” I met Michelle and her husband, Gilles, at the gym I attended in Queens. I approached the couple looking to ask Gilles if I could paint his portrait. He agreed but not before his wife jumped in and asked if I could paint her nude stating that she always wanted a nude portrait. I looked sheepishly at Gilles who gave me the OK. This was done on New Years Eve in my Queens apartment. It is probably the most “pretty” and photo real portrait that I ever did from a live sitting but that is because it was for Michelle. As I painted Michelle, Gilles sat behind me sipping wine and watching “I’m waiting for the nipple”, he told me. Michelle owns this portrait.

“Gilles” This was done in my Queens apartment. Gilles, his wife (Michelle) and I went to see the “Black Panther” Marvel movie: Gilles and I being comic book fans and Michelle pointing to every female superhero and asking if “that’s Storm”. This time it was Michelle who sat behind me (falling asleep in my papasan chair while I painted Gilles late into the night. I chose specific books to be included for Gilles’ portrait that I felt spoke to his character and my relationship with him. I would paint Gilles and Michelle one more time in a couple’s portrait but. on that night, Gilles and I got into an argument about politics that (as political arguments will do) tainted our friendship.

“Chris” Chris is the nephew of drag performer Flotilla De Barge and we met at one of her shows. I asked Chris over and planned to paint him in his underwear. I imagined he would wear boxers but he came in boxer briefs which I didn't like. After giving me the option of a thong, I decided it was best to go nude. I shied away, however, from including his penis because I was (am) overly aware of how Black men are hyper-sexualized. So I painted this sitting down (I am usually standing) so as to be at a lower plane to his body. Later I would see that Jordan Casteel in her renderings of nude Black men also hid the penises but I did not like it. I realized by looking at her work that it felt less like protecting Black men than coping out of painting penises.

“Jasmine” Jasmine and I had dated and after our relationship ended, she got pregnant by another man. Though it bothered me, I asked her to come sit for me. I was surprised when she agreed to because it seemed she always hated the portraits I did of her while we were dating. Here she is 5 months pregnant with her daughter Jordan. I had always thought Jasmine was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. I still do.

“Flavia” This was the first portrait I painted in the small back-room studio of my Brooklyn apartment. Unlike my Queens’ portraits, the room is barren and the wall is white. Flavia is an artist I met at my low residency MFA program in Berlin. I had to learn to like the starkness of this new setting and allow my portraits to rely on the figure without the accoutrements of a Mexican blanket and a patterned rug.

“Kevin” Kevin’s portrait was one of the earliest ones I did. This is actually completely from a photograph though there is a live-sitting version that did not come out well because I was just learning to be comfortable painting people live. I remember that Kevin was very nervous: not about sitting but nervous about me turning him away when he showed up; I asked him to come sit for me and he was afraid that the day he showed up I would be disappointed in how he looked. However we had a really good time together eating, drinking, and laughing a lot: This is where I understood what a pleasure it could be to constantly meet new people under these portrait-sitting circumstances. The walls come down. I added, of course, the goat head in later because I was trying to be cool. :/

“Syowia Kyambi” Syowia is a performance artist from Kenya who I also met through my MFA program in Berlin. Upon meeting her and hearing about her practice I was immediately drawn to her and was desperate to paint her portrait. She was, I immediately understood, important. And I wanted to paint people who held that type of gravitas. Syowia agreed and came over to the apartment I was renting in Berlin. Flavia joined us. I poured wine generously as I painted into the huge goblets that belonged to the apartment’s owner. We all got pretty drunk. Upon looking at it, Syowia remarked that I caught her “witchy” side.

“Andres Chulisi” At some point I started pursuing more public figures to sit for me: actors and singers and performers who played small venues like Teatro Sea on the Lower East Side and clubs and bars. Andres is a performance artist and actor who came to sit for me in the small, bare space in Brooklyn. I asked him to wear all white as a nod to his connection to Santeria. To help the composition, I sat the plant next to him. His reaction when he saw the face go in was a bit as though he were haunted: as though he sensed spirits in the room and through the work.

“Joey Arias” Done in the Lower East Side studio I rented through AAI, this portrait of Joey was more than 4 years in the making. I had doggedly pursued Joey in person, through Instagram, and via text for a long time before he agreed to come and sit for me. The composition is exactly as I imagined and many people observe how “quiet” this portrait is which is what I was looking for. We agreed to a corset, a Mugler wrap and undies but when Joey arrived, in true diva fashion, he posed in the black caftan he wore on the way over (which actually helped to make the portrait so still). Joey talked a lot about his life and his career and his belief in alien life forms. On the way to his Lyft, I teased him that I would tell everyone that all he talked about was aliens and, getting into his car, he held up the four finger Vulcan sign and told me to “live long and prosper”. — “Joey Arias” Done in the Lower East Side studio I rented through AAI, this portrait of Joey was more than 4 years in the making. I had doggedly pursued Joey in person, through Instagram, and via text for a long time before he agreed to come and sit for me. Over text, Joey is flirtatious and even downright bawdy (he sent a GIF of anal penetration once in our back and forths about the portrait). But in person, Joey starts off quite shy and reserved. The composition is exactly as I imagined and many people observe how “quiet” this portrait is which is what I was looking for. We agreed to a corset, a Mugler wrap and undies but when Joey arrived, in true diva fashion, he posed in the black caftan he wore on the way over (which actually helped to make the portrait so still). Joey talked a lot about his life and his career. He spoke candidly about his addiction and how a group of friends held an intervention for him which landed him in rehab. He also spoke a lot about his belief in alien life forms. On the way to his Lyft, I teased him that I would tell everyone that all he talked about was aliens and, getting into his car, he held up the four finger Vulcan sign and told me to “live long and prosper”.

“Self-portrait” Another very early work; When I first started painting I only did self-portraits (all from staged photographs)—a combination of trepidation of asking people to pose and narcissism. This was done in the Queens apartment (I lived there for close to 20 years) off of a photograph I took with a rubber skull I held in my hands and a separate photograph of a small model skeleton arranged in the position I needed. Since the model skeleton was so small, I had to figure out how to “realize” its hand down my underwear and on my crotch so I fashioned a skeleton hand out of rolled of paper, tape and pipe cleaners which was very painful once inserted in my tight-whiteys. The image as a whole is meant to symbolize sexual trauma and the desert of self-imposed long-term celibacy.

“Jeannie Sol” Jeannie was the first “stranger” I reached out to to paint. I had seen her for years in various bars and clubs singing and used social media to reach out to her. As someone who is a spiritualist she immediately began reading the room and telling me what the spirits around us were thinking and saying to her. I asked her to wear the black dress with her hair out to capture this witchy-quality of her character. This was done in the Brooklyn apartment but I decided to pose her somewhere else in the apartment growing weary of the blank white wall of the backroom studio. The glass of wine and bowl of fruit are what I always entertained my sittings with.

“Chris Jr” Also done in another part of the Brooklyn apartment (by this time the small back studio was too filled with paintings to use as a painting space) Chris Jr (son of Chris whose portrait is above) was the first portrait I did “after” the COVID 19 pandemic. During the end of my MFA program, and then the start of the pandemic I had done other figurative work based on trauma, memory, and family. I had thought that I had moved on from portraits having found what seemed a deeper well from which to make art. But doing this portrait of Chris Jr reminded me of the joy I got from the communal act of painting a live person. The face resembles Chris Jr but not completely. I thought for a few moments to fix it as he sat there but decided that the face I captured with the large eyes and broad mouth was a great face and maybe more emblematic of Jr’s youthful and open character.

“Monica Xtravaganza” Hailing from the House of Xtravaganza, I had known Monica for a long time hanging out with her as we both waited for Barbra Herr to finish a lip synching set and hop to the next bar or club. This is one of only two portraits I painted in the bedroom of my Queens apartment. The chair belongs to my friend Toby; I wanted a different, more elegant piece of furniture for Monica so Toby loaned it to me and I brought it home from Harlem on the subway for the weekend. i asked Monica to put her hair up and had the flowers and shawl ready because, for a reason I cannot remember, I imagined her as a Spanish lady for the portrait (I probably saw something that inspired this. Monica was the first person I paid to sit for me and she was professional to a fault; though that night NYC was experiencing some ridiculous weather called something like a “super cyclone hurricane” or something, Monica did not cancel and arrived (from Hell’s Kitchen) on time. To ease my own tension while painting, I like to engage my sitter’s in conversation but Monica (who probably felt she was being paid to sit quietly) would not talk much so it was a difficult night for me. By the time I got to the shawl, the green was muddying up a lot of the other parts I was painting. I resigned myself to finish from a photograph and although Monica had been sitting for three hours straight very quietly, she assured me she could keep going if I needed her to. Telling her it was OK, she got up, took a look at the progress, laughed, and said, “no one will ever believe that’s me”.

“Carlos Alberta Valencia” Carlos is a gifted actor that I had known many years ago. Trying to use my time at the AAI studio wisely, I cast a wide net for people willing to sit for me and, though we had not spoken in over a decade, Carlos agreed to come sit. Though later I would use the actual studio space of AAI that was assigned to me, I put Carlos and myself in the hallway because I did not want the white walls of the studio for his portrait. AAI is housed in The Clemente building just off Delancy street and was once a public school: that’s maybe why it looks like Carlos is sitting in a prison. The shirt is mine. To add some color, I pulled the fern that lived in the women’s bathroom out and placed it next to him. Being of Colombian decent, Carlos noted that I caught the indigenous part of him. There is, to me, something sad about his expression.

“Juanito” This was also in the hallways of AAI and Juanito was another product of my casting a wider net for sittings while I had the Lower East Side studio space available to me. I had only known him from Instagram: he is a young exotic dancer but more than his look, I wanted to capture what I found exciting in the pictures he posted on social media: that youthful love of life and hope that many of us dance with in our twenties in NYC. Juanito reminded me in many ways of my younger self when having male physical beauty and a lively social life were the only two things I coveted. It sounds ugly but there is a lightness in it I remember: a feeling of being on top of the world and being invulnerable and always happy. Serendipitously, Juanito’s last name is Lopez, like mine and I took to calling him my little brother. His energy at the time of the sitting was exactly as expected, youthful, open, sweet, and giving.

“Zeinab” All through my MFA program with Transart Institute, I found myself being the apologist for figurative painting. Everyone was way cooler as were their methods of making. I was always surrounded by performance artists, conceptual artists, artists who could not POSSIBLY describe their work, and artists who went on and on about what their work was about, and artists who did not really—do any work. At the beginning, being “just a portrait painter” was unnerving. But by the time I met Zeinab, a year into the program, I was a bit more assured of who i was and what I did and the validity and relevance of my work. Just outside of Berlin, my MFA classmates and I were thrown together with a group of other artists in a country home to experiment with sound. As usual I was a fish out of water. Wanting to salvage something from the experience however, I asked Zeinab, a cello player at the residency to sit for me. I did not have canvas, brushes, or paint so I simply sketched her, with as much detail as possible, with pen and paper. I took a photo of her in the pose with my phone and later, when I returned to the states, I used the sketch and the photo to make the portrait.

“Joe” Joe Belfatti is a friend of many years and he agreed to come sit in my Brooklyn apartment. having not included books in many years, I wanted to return to what was a bit of a motif in some of my earlier portraits. Joe was laughably preoccupied by how he looked and I had to warn him he was throwing me off with his preoccupations. As a result of his worrying me, I made him pretty: His eyes were womanish. I fixed this after he left. I also decided to add the hanging leaves after the portrait was complete.