I recently went to a small gallery in the Meat Packing District and was met by the gallery’s director at the door. She was a warm and lovely woman who I could tell in our lengthy conversation lived a sensational life. As she began showing me the works, she became quickly apologetic; “we usually have here”, she informed me, “more Avant garde art than this”. “This” was painting, figurative painting to be exact. Before she could go further I told her I was a figurative painter. We neatly rolled away from the subject and talked of life which was how I came to understand she lived a rich and full one.
While I felt the familiar sting of “irrelevance” hearing someone important (and to me she was important) speak about figurative painting, I could not help but recognize that a portion of me agrees with that assessment: figurative painting is done.
And yet the conundrum is: figurative painting is what I do. Specifically portrait painting.
Recently, I have explored other ways to work figuratively by taking a thematic approach looking at archives, trauma, memory, and bi-raciality (that’s not a word yet?). I have also explored the materiality of the canvas by pulling my work off the stretchers and hanging them like tapestries.
But then, the call came.
My partner’s son, Chris Jr. came to visit. We had met before but had not spent significant, quality time together. Well, I thought, what better way than to have him sit for a portrait? I imagine this is how drug addicts reconcile feeding their addiction: finding some disconnected excuse to once again pick up the needle. For me, that needle was a brush.
Chris Jr. obliged me for over three hours and, as usual, he and I were thick as thieves by the end of the session. Surprisingly, I had liked what I had done. I had achieved something, I felt. The work was good.
Back in 2018 when I started my MFA at Transart, we MFA candidates had an opening critique of our work. Most of the panel were polite and supportive. But Kim Schoen was the Simon Cowell to everyone else’s Paula Abdul’s. “You should only ever do portraits” she told me. “Nothing else”.
She was, to me, also important.