New Distance Portraits

Imagine, 1948, Alberto Giacometti is sitting in the Place d’Italie in Paris looking across the busy square, observing people going about their day. A brunette woman is rushing by, 3 men, laugh and share a bottle of wine, laughing as she passes, a family is looking up, shouting to an older woman in a window, arms outstretched and Alberto pulls out some paper and begins to sketch as he did non-stop, keenly observing. In the distance are tiny, barely visible figures emerging from the spring day, he takes note and returns to his studio to create one of the most iconic, recognizable and elongated forms of 20th century art.

Alberto was deeply inspired by distance. He felt it was important to capture the effect our eyes see things from a distance. Probably on a deeper level, I’m sure he was trying to also depict the space between things and how that space distorts reality itself. In one instance he was working with his model at the time, Isabel Nicholas from a distance on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he noted that although her features were unrecognizable, her essence, remained intact, she was surrounded by an “atmospheric aura.” This is probably what kept him going the most, searching for that aura in his art.

"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity."

Now switch to another scene, me looking at a pre 2000 video connected to my TV, I live in NYC at this time so I am doing a lot of shooting, anything I can find, mostly crowds and drunken parties to pull out treasures of inspiration for my paintings. Having read In Giacometti’s Studio a couple years before, I take notice of not the people in the foreground, but the people in the background, the distortions that drew Alberto to see something new in reality, I was seeing again, but in video form. I quickly took not and started to work it through.

Having always struggled with being too tight in my painting practice, I thought this was the perfect way to loosen up, it was, and I did. The paintings above were painted around 2000, I worked on 12x12 canvases and acrylic paint, pulling unrecognizable random people out of the background and tentatively adding a stroke here, a blob there until I felt that it actually felt like someone. It was fun, so much fun in fact that a number of years later in 2019 I started doing it again. this time, I felt I they were a bit more successful.

I will continue to work on these and may even go really big, 5’x5’ would be a nice size. I also have plans to do portraits from Zoom meetings, some peoples cameras are just awful, but thats ok with me, that’s what I like, that twist of reality is pure inspiration.