National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Portrait of an Artist: Jennifer Levonian

This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.

Jennifer Levonian, who participated in our interviews last autumn, was named second prize winner of the third Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

Still from Buffalo Milk Yogurt / Jennifer Levonian / Digital video/animation (6:46 minutes), 2010 / Collection of the artist

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Jennifer Levonian. I was born in West Virginia. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for thirteen years.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: For the past six years, I’ve been making cutout animations using watercolor paintings.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: For each animation, I make dozens of painted watercolor backdrops, cutouts, and puppets. Then I animate the cutouts through stop-motion. I shoot digital photographs and edit them using Final Cut.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.), and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I studied art at the College of William and Mary and then later at the Rhode Island School of Design.

When I was a student, I painted in oil on canvas. I owe my switch in medium to an animation class I took in grad school. I signed up for the class on a whim and became so enthralled by animation that I haven’t painted anything on canvas since then.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: My cutout animation Buffalo Milk Yogurt depicts a man who has a nervous breakdown in a gourmet supermarket while a naked woman practices yoga in a display of fall pumpkins. The main character, Corey Fogel, also wrote and performed the music featured in the animation.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: Right now I’m working on an animation about a ghost that haunts a Pennsylvania Dutch–themed all-you-can-eat-buffet.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: As I’ve grown more comfortable with the medium, my projects have become more ambitious by involving other people. I used to paint myself as the main character because I was just too nervous asking someone else to sit for portraits and record dialogue.

For my 2011 animation Rebellious Bird (made after a residency at the Library Company of Philadelphia), I interviewed a female Civil War reenactor in West Virginia and then animated portions of that interview. Also, with one exception, all of my recent works feature original music that was scored to the animations after they were finished. Asking other people to be involved was a move outside of my comfort zone, but one I’m happy to have taken—I feel the work is richer because of their involvement.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.

A: This memory is a little cheesy, but once when I was about ten, I was drawing in a notebook at the beach. A Scottish tourist saw that I liked to draw, so she sat beside me and filled pages of my notebook with delicate marker drawings of animals. To me, this was pure magic. I was mesmerized—partly because of her Scottish accent, and also because it was the first time I saw an adult draw so easily and joyfully.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: Pierre Bonnard

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: Old Woman Frying Eggs by Diego Velázquez

Q: What inspires you?

A: These days I get a lot of ideas on my morning walks with my daughter and dog. Our Philadelphia neighborhood was once nicknamed “The Workshop of the World” because of its booming textile industry, and many nineteenth-century factory buildings remain, right alongside more modern buildings. This layering of time is one of the things I love most about Philadelphia. It never fails to stir my imagination.

Still from Take a Picture with a Puma / Jennifer Levonian / Digital video/animation (6:56 minutes), 2010 

 

Portrait of an Artist: Bo Gehring

This is the eleventh in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It features the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Bo Gehring, who participated in our interviews last autumn, was named first prize winner of the third Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

Still from Jessica Wickham by Bo Gehring / HD video (5:05 minutes), 2010 / Collection of the artist

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Bo Gehring, Beacon, New York

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: Currently video, 3-D computer animation, and 3-D audio. In the past I’ve worked in cast bronze, cast stainless steel, cast aluminum, machined foam, and machined industrial felt.

Most of my projects are computer-related (I have a long background in 3-D animation and design) and sometimes involve programs that I write in C language to, for example, transform music into 3-D surfaces or drive an artistic process with stochastic data.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: It varies. But as an example, I have a really big milling machine that I originally acquired to make casting patterns for the front of a building at 40 Bond Street in Lower Manhattan. Although I’m not especially musical, I do love music and am deeply affected by it emotionally. When the 40 Bond Street project was done, I had the idea to use the milling machine to create a body of carved and painted foam surfaces derived from music.

Did that for a couple of years—what to do next? One day I was looking at that wonderful tool sitting idle and realized it would make a precision camera platform like no other. The idea of close-up motion portraits came right to mind. And so why not try to capture some of the emotion when someone hears favorite music? Bought a video camera. Now, three years later, I have a growing body of work around this concept, which never would have occurred without a lot of happenstance.

What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

I had a good start in college but became disenchanted with engineering and dropped out to become an artist. In spite of believing I would never willingly do anything like engineering again, events quickly conspired to put me into very high-tech computer pursuits for the next thirty-five years. I was an early computer animator and also earned two patents developing three-dimensional sound.

This background informs every art project I do; in fact I think of each of my artworks as a direct outgrowth, or flowering if you like, of the skills I learned during all those years in technology.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: From an artist friend, Mariella Bisson.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: At lunch in a deli I ran into Jessica Wickham, a precision woodworker in Beacon, also on lunch break and in her shop clothes. Would she like to do a portrait right after lunch? Okay. I happened to have a CD of Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten,” her favorite and coincidentally one of mine, too.

On first viewing, the portrait was obviously something special. The way Jessica makes eye contact and then slides back into the music was extraordinary. And I really liked the Crocs shoes and work clothes. That is why I submitted this particular portrait. I’ve seen it a hundred times and still tear up when it plays.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: I don’t have any special desire to build a huge body of work, although that seems to be happening anyway. It’s important to me that each effort covers new ground: I’m basically an inventor, and I like work that exercises the things I know how to do at full bandwidth.

So far, in addition to these videos I’ve worked in just about every discipline involving metal and computers, computer-machined foam and industrial felt, and computer animation. Moving into video and maybe eventually 3-D sound is a logical extension.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I built a portable rig, which is as good as the huge milling machine for taking portraits, and hope to use that to collect portraits in the field like the early portrait photographers.

Q: Has your work changed over time?

A: Yes. I seem to move from discipline to discipline with no predictable trajectory. Actually I live for the variety.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had has an artist.

A: Loving music and realizing I could use it to make time-based art.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: Brancusi.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Leonardo.

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: Don’t know how to answer. So many. But I do love the whimsy and non-mechanicalness of Calder’s moving sculptures.

Q: What inspires you?

A: I’m an optimistic sap at heart so . . . anything. But family and friends in particular.

Jessica Wickham by Bo Gehring / HD video (5:05 minutes), 2010 / Collection of the artist

NPG Pop Quiz Trivia Night: Ladies First

March is Women’s History Month, and the National Portrait Gallery is excited to host a special event celebrating the contributions of the famous, fearless, and fabulous ladies in our collection. Join us in the Kogod Courtyard on Thursday, March 28, at 6:30 p.m. for NPG Pop Quiz, a collections-inspired trivia game.

This month’s theme, “Ladies First,” will highlight the groundbreaking women who made strides as the “first” in their field and had a major impact on history and culture. For example, did you know that Amelia Earhart once wrote an aviation column for Cosmopolitan magazine? Or that when young architect Maya Lin submitted her winning design for the Vietnam memorial, she beat out hundreds of other applicants, including one of her professors at Yale (who gave her a B in his course!)?

Here is a sneak peek at the 10-point bonus question for this month’s Pop Quiz trivia:

First Lady Martha Washington married George Washington in 1759, pulling him upward in Virginia’s social and economic strata. Martha was viewed by contemporaries as a quiet, reserved woman capable of managing an estate. She contributed to her husband’s climb to national leadership in numerous ways. During the Revolutionary War, Martha even stayed with her husband in the army’s winter encampment.

What was Martha’s title while her husband was president?

A. Lady Martha
B. Mrs. President
C. Lady Washington
D. Mrs. Presidentress

The Courtyard Café will be open, and snacks and beverages will be available for purchase.

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery.

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington / Unidentified artist / Oil on canvas, c.1800–25 / National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution

Amelia Earhart returns to America / Unidentified photographer for Acme Newspictures, Inc / Gelatin silver print, 1932 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Opens!

The third Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is on the walls.  Like the previous iterations of the competition, this installment features many compelling, diverse works which represent the breadth of American portraiture.  The winner of the competition’s first prize was Bo Gehring, whose video portrait is the first work in that medium ever to be selected as competition winner.

Still from Jessica Wickham by Bo Gehring

Gehring’s work is a slowly moving, vertical, digital portrait, bottom to top, of his sitter, Jessica Wickham.  It is not a tilt, as the camera is not stationary; it is more akin to a video scan.  Gehring’s camera moves from below the feet of his subject to beyond the top of her head, equidistant from her body during the entire, seemingly ascendant—seemingly because the subject is laying down—process of the shot.        

Dorothy Moss, curator of the competition, said of the work, “Bo Gehring’s portrait of Jessica Wickham was selected unanimously by the jury as the first prize winner. It was exciting to see a panel of informed, opinionated people come together in complete agreement. We were all especially struck by the poignancy of the moment when Wickham self-consciously looks away from the camera revealing the intimate dynamic between artist and subject and implicating us (the viewers) in the process.” For his winning portrait, Gehring will receive a $25,000 prize and a separate commission from the museum to portray a remarkable living American for its permanent collection.

In an earlier interview with NPG, Gehring noted, “I had a good start in college but became disenchanted with engineering and dropped out to become an artist. In spite of believing I would never willingly do anything like engineering again, events quickly conspired to put me into very high-tech computer pursuits for the next thirty-five years. I was an early computer animator and also earned two patents developing three-dimensional sound. This background informs every art project I do; in fact, I think of each one of my artworks as a direct outgrowth, or flowering if you like, of the skills I learned in all those years in technology.”

The range of the works submitted was great.  Inside the field of forty-eight portraits, many are traditional forms such as oil on canvas and sculpture, while others are photographs, textiles, and collage.  There are also four video portraits, one of which is projected onto a glitter screen.  The sitters also encompass a broad range of individuals, including relatives of the artists—moms, dads, and cousins—and friends of the artists.  There are also self-portraits, portraits of homeless individuals, soldiers, and strangers.

Still from Buffalo Milk Yogurt by Jennifer Levonian

Second prize was awarded to Jennifer Levonian of Philadelphia, who submitted a digital video animation titled Buffalo Milk Yogurt. Third prize went to Sequoyah Aono of New York. His self-portrait sculpture was created with acrylic on wood.

Commended artists are Paul D’Amato of Riverside, Illinois for his photograph Lillian, New Covenant Church of Deliverance, Chicago, 2011; Martha Mayer Erlebacher, from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania for her pencil-on-paper self-portrait; Heidi Fancher, from Washington, D.C., for her C-print photograph titled For Delia; and Beverly McIver of Durham, North Carolina for her oil-on-canvas work titled, Depression. Each will also be awarded a cash prize.

“The overall quality of this competition’s entries was incredibly strong across media. A theme that runs through the work in the exhibition is perseverance and the human capacity for resilience,” said Moss, adding, “The artists, whether making self-portraits, individual portrayals, or exploring the dynamic between family members in group portraits, are working through uncertainty and finding resolution while mastering their chosen medium.”

 The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Mobile App

Learn more about the portrait competition with our free mobile app! Tour the exhibition, listen to interviews, get inside information, and vote your favorite portrait for the People’s Choice Award.

The Death of the Gallant Pelham

March 17 marks 150 years since the death of Confederate artillery officer John Pelham at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia. 

Young men from both sides of the conflict hurried toward the war, that they might fight and achieve the glory they had sought so desperately since they first read Ivanhoe, perhaps, or Morte d’Arthur.  Some left farms, some left shops in the city, many left wives and children, and a few left school, in an age when eighteen, nineteen, and twenty year old men were more likely to be employed than still about their studies.

The class of 1861, West Point, was a different case altogether.  Some were sons of the Confederacy, others sons of the Union, but they all wanted to enter the fray and make their mark immediately.  The choice to leave or to finish their studies at the United States Military Academy was not an easy one.  The West Point education—an automatic ticket to the upper echelon of American military leadership— was not an opportunity to forego lightly.

John Pelham of Alabama was one of the young men forced to make such a difficult choice.  Pelham was to graduate West Point with the class of 1861 when the Confederacy fired upon Fort Sumter.  Among Pelham’s classmates was George Armstrong Custer, a brave if not excessively vain young fighter who would rise through the ranks quickly, only to be outmatched and cut down at Little Big Horn.  Of those in that class of 1861, Custer did not have a monopoly on bravery and flair.  John Pelham was certainly Custer’s equal, if not in many ways his better.

Pelham had been one of the wonder cadets at West Point, excelling in many areas of study.  He also brought with him no small amount of charm.  In his history of that famous academy class, Sacred Ties, From West Point Brothers to Battlefield Rivals: A True Story of the Civil War, Tom Carhart notes, he was “an excellent horseman… and was quite the dancer.”    

Leaving the military academy without waiting for graduation, Pelham joined the rebel army; his service was duly noted, especially his performance at the battle of Fredericksburg in December, 1862.  Fighting an overwhelming number of oncoming federal forces, Pelham, himself, with the aid of his few surviving artillery men, successfully held the ground and stalled a Union incursion.  At the site of the battle, Robert E. Lee stated, “It is glorious to see such courage in one so young.”

Fredericksburg was a great victory for Lee; it was the first of two of Lee’s successive strikes against the greater Union army.  The fight at Chancellorsville, in late April and early May of 1863, would be Lee’s second successful initiative against Union opposition during this phase of the war.  In the larger battle at Chancellorsville, Lee would lose one of his key advisors and strategists, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.  Before that battle, in a bit of a less tempestuous fray at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia, on March 17, Lee would also lose one of his significant operatives.

Carhart describes the scene of John Pelham’s final fight:

When Pelham arrived on the scene of the battle, his artillery had not yet come up, though he had sent for it.  The most commonly told story of what followed has the 3^rd Virginia forming up for attack, and Pelham staying by them or riding with them, standing up in his stirrups, waving his hat or his sword and cheering them on:  “Forward! Forward!” But soon after those words left his lips, a Yankee shell exploded above and behind him, and a piece of shrapnel, later said to be the size of the end of one’s finger, pierced the back of his head at the hairline.  The charge by the 3^rd went on as Pelham fell from his horse.

The gallant Pelham never knew and never awakened.  He would be mourned by thousands as he lay in state in Richmond, and from there he would be taken home to Alabama where he would be buried in his home town of Jacksonville.  Young girls from Virginia and Alabama would weep at the loss of this brave and handsome southern officer, while the Confederate leadership would view this loss as a significant one.  Major John Pelham’s star had burned brightly, but briefly for his cause.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

John Pelham / Mathew B. Brady / Half-plate ambrotype, 1858 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:
Carhart, Tom.  Sacred Ties, From West Point Brothers to Battlefield Rivals: A True Story of the Civil War.  New York: Berkley Caliber (a division of Penguin Books), 2010.

NPG Welcomes Milissa Ferrari to the Museum Store

This is the latest installment in our series of mini-portraits of NPG staffers and interns. We recently spoke with Milissa Ferrari, manager of the recently renovated museum store at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum in the Donald W. Reynolds Center.

Q: Please tell us about your career and education.

A: I have a BA in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a student I ran the art galleries for the student unions at the university. After graduating, I helped to open the Madison Civic Center— which housed two theaters and the Madison Art Center—working as the outreach and volunteer coordinator as well as house manager. I moved on to the Dallas Opera in Texas, where I worked in the marketing department, then on to become director of the Learning Annex (a national adult education program) in Chicago.

After taking a brief time off to have my two children, I began a new career in retail with Williams-Sonoma while still working on various art education programs through various school districts and serving on local arts councils. I was able to combine both my arts and retail experience in my next job as the store manager for the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. After three years in Portland, I am now here as the store director for the two gift shops located in the building for the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, as well as the Renwick Gallery.

Q: What is your vision for the museums’ store?

A: My vision for this store is that it becomes a destination shopping spot for the neighborhood and a wonderful surprise for all visitors. My hope is that it will appeal to the more serious art lover through our collection of art related books and monographs and yet also to the novice, with products inspired by works from the collection and the other beautiful, whimsical, and wonderful things we offer in the shop.

Q: Do you have some favorite works in the collections?

A: I have very diverse taste in art. My new favorite works from the collection include the beautiful watercolors by Till Freiwald, I am always drawn in by them. I also love William H. Johnson's work and George Nakashima's beautiful wood pieces. Also, I really like the portrait of Pocahontas.

Q: How do you like Washington, DC?

A: I’m very lucky to have lived a rather nomadic life. I have lived in many big cities. Washington is a wonderful and sunny change from my last three years in Portland. I am living very close to the two museums and love that I have so many wonderful things to do and see all within walking distance. I don't have a car and am so pleased to be able to hop on the Metro or even the Circulator to get around town.

I am very happy with my move here and have already reached a comfort level that usually takes a bit longer than the two months I've been here so far.

Q: Can you tell us about some of your hobbies or interests?

I am a big foodie, for one thing. I have been eating my way around town, always looking for good food wherever it might be found. My second passion is music. I love to hear live performances in small settings. I haven't really found any place for that yet but I'm open to suggestions.

I am an adventurer, so if anyone has thoughts on a neighborhood I should be walking around, a market I should go to, please stop in the shop and give me your suggestions. Guidebooks are ok for the casual tourist but I would rather have the inside scoop from those who know.

Portrait of an Artist: Jason Hanasik

This is the tenth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Sharrod with the toy gun his grandfather gave him / Jason Hanasik / Digital C-Print. 2010 / 20x24 inches

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now? 

A: My name is Jason Hanasik. I am from the Hampton Roads area of Virginia and I currently live in San Francisco, California. 

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I mainly work with photography, video, and installation. 

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.), and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I have an MFA in visual arts from California College of the Arts and a BFA summa cum laude from the State University of New York at Purchase. I have served as an adviser in the graduate program at California College of the Arts and am currently the senior manager of Digital Brand Communications in the Marketing Department at Gap–North America.

I include my day job since the role was created for me after I created Gap Incorporated’s contribution to the international “It Gets Better” campaign. This video, my first live-action video, not only launched my commercial/editorial career but also positioned video as a major component in my artistic practice. 

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: When NPG relaunched in 2006, I took a quick trip to DC to check out the museum and completely fell in love with a series of exhibitions that looked at a single important individual through the various “portraits” [the “One Life” series] they left behind/sat for during their lifetime. When I moved to the West Coast in 2007, I lost touch with the museum as I burrowed into my studies.

My interest and knowledge of the programming reignited during the run of the exhibition “Hide/Seek,” a show I was very interested in seeing and luckily did see before it moved to other venues. Consequently, when a few friends told me about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, I immediately put the next entry date on my calendar! Being a part of the lineage of the organization is definitely a dream come true. 

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: I submitted the video installation Sharrod (Turn/Twirl).

I began working with Sharrod, the main protagonist of the piece, at the end of 2008 while I was home on holiday in my hometown, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. At the time, I was completing the project “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore” and was not only hungry for a new project but also very interested in how the military grooms and sculpts its young recruits. (The idea was a natural transition from the project I was finishing up.) Sharrod’s mother and my father were coworkers and friends, and by happenstance, Sharrod was also a freshman at my alma mater, Salem High School. Most important, he was enrolled in the military’s high school preparatory program NJROTC, the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp. 

Sharrod (Turn/Twirl) was created during the winter of 2010. Earlier that year, Sharrod told me a story about an experience he had at a mock boot camp. According to Sharrod, the commanding officer made all of the young recruits stand at attention to be inspected for long periods of time. Sharrod shared that a few of the young men started losing their balance, and one passed out because they were locking their knees and stopping the blood flow to their brain. (I should note that I have always been fascinated by the military salute and have even tried to re-create the perfect salute myself in my bathroom mirror.)

I asked Sharrod to re-create the salute as a durational exercise, but this time my camera would be the one doing the inspection. After about ten minutes, I was thoroughly bored and told Sharrod that the idea was a bust and apologized for wasting his time. As I began breaking down my equipment, Sharrod, holding the salute, turned slightly and I saw what would become Sharrod (Turn/Twirl). I set the camera back up, explained my vision and captured the raw footage that would become Sharrod (Turn/Twirl).

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: I’m really interested in openness, transparency, cycles, and expectations. I’ll leave the latter two, cycles and expectations, for a later question and will instead focus on how openness and transparency inform and in some ways guide my inquiry and focus.

When I was a teenager, my parents sat my sister and me down to tell us a family secret. At that moment, my family’s narrative split into two—the reality I had been living and the one in which I was asked to rectify and assimilate. As the years went by, I began to see ruptures in the various lives all around me, including my own. For example, friends’ parents were catching spouses in extramarital affairs; I was hiding my sexuality from my family and some friends; friends/soldiers were struggling with the deaths of other friends but unable to share publicly because they thought it was not masculine/honorable, etc.

These schisms between a secret/private emotional life and a public experience confused me greatly. When I finished the initial process of coming out, the breach I was seeing in other lives began to become the focus of my work. This awareness manifests itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes, I choose to focus on the disconnect mentioned above, and ask questions about why it is present and what motivating factors perpetuate the schism between private and public. Other times, I choose to document and present an unguarded picture of the things I often see hiding in plain sight.

Q: What are you currently working on? 

A: I am currently working on a project called "We always thought the walls would protect us, but suddenly realized they were as weak as our frames." The installation will open at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery as part of a two-person show called “Conversations 6” in early 2013.

The piece continues my interest in family, affect, home, loss, collaborating with my subjects, and storytelling but introduces my recent fascination with theater into the mix. “We always thought the walls would protect us, but suddenly realized they were as weak as our frames” is the first in what I imagine will be a series of projects/manifestations about what I experienced and have been processing since 2010. In 2010, my first long-term relationship ended, my family lost our home due to consequences stemming from the recession, and my little (and only) sister died very unexpectedly.

This first project deals mainly with the loss of my family home; however, as I have been making and writing about the piece, I realize that there are definitely references to the departure of my boyfriend and the sudden loss of my sister. 

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: My work has definitely changed over time. In 2002, I made a portrait of my parents, Jeff and Jackie Hanasik (below), which basically opened my eyes to not only the power of images but also clarified for me—and I think my audience—what I was up to in my work. From the moment I brought that picture into my junior seminar at SUNY–Purchase to about 2006–7, I was primarily focused on creating medium- to large- format, somewhat static portraits.

By the time I entered graduate school in 2007, I was restless and bored with the process, practice, and especially rules of exhibiting photographs. The photography world had burst open as weblogs proliferated and the photo world seemed to get bigger. This was awesome but seemed somehow smaller, as I felt like I was seeing the same types of pictures over and over again. Video and installation became more interesting to me, as did nontraditional exhibition formats being explored earlier in the decade by Wolfgang Tilmans.

While boredom was definitely a motivating factor, I know now that it was really frustration about not being able to create experiences that truly transported my viewer into the spaces, mindsets, and/or questions that I was trying to develop and was curious about in my work. Over the course of the last five years (and two long-term projects), my practice is now richer, more diverse, and my intentions and concepts have become much more nuanced and, I hope, clearer to the viewer.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.

A: In the fall of 2009, I presented my first solo exhibition, “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore,” in New York City at +Kris Graves Projects. As the opening reception was winding down, and only a few people were left in the gallery, two women caught my attention, so I went over and introduced myself. One of the women appeared to be consoling the other one and I asked if everything was all right. With tears in her eyes, the woman who was crying looked up at me and said, “Thank you. My son returned from Iraq a few months ago and well, he just didn’t seem right and I could not understand. Tonight, after looking at your project, I think I understand what he is going through. Thank you.” Needless to say, that interaction has stuck with me ever since. 

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: Naming just one is much too difficult, so instead, here are a few: Larry Sultan, Paul Cadmus, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, Jesper Just, Collier Schorr, Dan Flavin, and Paul Chan.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Larry Kramer. He’s popped up a lot for me in my twenties. I just recently had the chance to see The Normal Heart at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and thought it was absolutely amazing. His “portraits” in that play and in the book Faggots are incredible. I have no idea what we’d make together, but I think the way he uses personal biography as an igniting force for drama, portraiture, and storytelling is really compelling and in line with my own interests and practice. 

Q: What inspires you?

A: Expectations and cycles and finding ways to expose these, unravel them and ask questions why we fall into/accept them in the first place.

Growing up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, I was inundated by narrow views of masculinity and femininity and the conservative religious right. Although my family traveled up and down the East Coast a lot as a kid, it was not until I entered my twenties and moved to New York and then San Francisco that I realized how much I was beholden to suffocating ideas about gender presentation, sexuality, and family dynamics.

As my work has matured, I’ve been able to investigate these earlier experiences, locate them in culture and embark on new projects that explode them open. Ultimately, I hope to ask questions that motivate viewers to locate and examine similarly closed perspectives in themselves.

Jeff and Jackie Hanasik / Jason Hanasik, 2002 / Digital C-Print / 20x20 inches

 

Portrait of an Artist: Keliy-Anderson-Staley

This is the ninth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Helen, 2009 / Keliy-Anderson-Staley /  Wet-plate collodion tintype. 8 x 10 in

Q: What is your name, where are you from, and where do you live now?

A: My name is Keliy Anderson-Staley. I grew up in Guilford, Maine, where my family lived in an off-the-grid log cabin. After college, I spent ten years living in New York City, and I currently live in Arkansas.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I do some collage and sculpture, but my work is primarily photographic. I use a variety of processes, including the wet-plate collodion process, which I use to make tintypes. I also work with color film, cyanotype, and digital photography.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: The wet-plate collodion tintype process was one of the earliest photographic methods. It was used in the 1850s and 1860s by portraitists and the photographers, such as Mathew Brady and Timothy O'Sullivan, who documented the Civil War. I am especially interested in the work of those photographers in the period, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Felix Nadar, who pursued it as a fine art.

I use antique brass lenses, large wooden view cameras, and several chemical concoctions that I mix up myself according to historic recipes. It is called “wet-plate” photography because the whole image must be exposed, developed, and fixed while the image surface is still wet.

The image is made on a metal plate inside the camera, so the resulting image is one-of-a-kind unless it is reproduced by digital means. I sometimes blow the images up for visual effect (like the piece in the Outwin Boochever exhibition). I like marrying the old process with the new to make an image that is contemporary, even though it is made with an older process.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

                 Photograph by Andrej Tur

A: I went to Hampshire College for my BA and concentrated in photography. Hampshire encourages student-directed projects, and my time there culminated in a large-scale photographic installation. My mentor, the late Robert Seydel, taught me to think of photography in the broader context of art and to think of its borders with other art forms as fluid.

My photographic projects still tend to be fairly installational, with the sculptural arrangement of the images adding to the meaning of the work. I earned an MFA at Hunter College in New York City. My upbringing informed a lot of my early photographic work, including the work I did in graduate school, and my first major project, Off the Grid, was a semiautobiographical study of families living without modern amenities in Maine. My abiding interest in people continues to drive my work in portraiture.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I became aware of it during the last competition cycle, and I knew a couple of artists who had work in the exhibition.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: I submitted a portrait called Kevin that I made in 2010 while at a residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York. I photographed dozens of people from the community while I was there, and Kevin was among them.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: This image comes from a series called “[Hyphen] Americans.” The project is composed of more than 1,000 portraits. Each individual in the project defiantly asserts his or her selfhood, resisting any imposed or external categorizing system that we might bring to these images.

Shot over eight years, these portraits were made all over the country. I intentionally withhold the demographic information that would have accompanied such images in the nineteenth century, opening up the possibility to reconsider the place of each face within history. The viewer connects directly with the sitter without any mediation beyond the image and the process. Thus, the individuality of the sitter is highlighted, even as history remains the principal subject.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I am currently developing a book of my tintype portraits that will be available later in 2013. The book, titled On a Wet Bough after a haiku by Ezra Pound, will be published by Waltz Photo Books. I am also working on a series called “An Archive of Inherited Fictions” with support from the Howard Foundation. This new project examines the ways that we use both images from the past and heirloom objects to define our sense of identity and heritage.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: I used to focus more on narrative-based photographic projects, but my work is now more conceptual. I like both modes, and I think photography is well-suited to both, but I like projects that make photography the subject of inquiry as much as the vehicle of it.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

I'm inspired by so many artists—in all media—that it would be hard to name just one. The artists I consider most influential include Carrie Mae Weems, Christian Boltanski, and Robert Frank, especially his later work.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Hannah Hoch or Kurt Schwitters. I love their collage work, and I really love that period of art (1920s Europe). I am also really drawn to the collage work of American artists Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: It would be impossible for me to name any one work. I saw a few works of art in late 2012 that are still really in my thoughts—The Clock by Christian Marclay and Asterisms by Gabriel Orozco.

Q: What inspires you?

A: I go to as many museum and gallery shows as I can. I am always looking at photography and art, and I am continually inspired by the new work I see. I also find the process of making a portrait to be quite inspirational. I am really fascinated by people, and by faces in particular. I love the interactions I have with people as I photograph them, and their response to their tintype as they watch it develop. Making a portrait is a collaborative venture, and it is while I am making portraits that I feel fully engaged in the creative process.

Holly, 2010 / Keliy Anderson-Staley / Wet-plate collodion tintype. 8 x 10 in

Pop Quiz trivia event: “Poetic Likeness” - February 27th

Robert Frost (above) once said, “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Come delight us with your wisdom and see how much you really know about poetry at Pop Quiz: “Poetic Likeness”!

This month’s Pop Quiz takes place on February 27. The night is hosted by curator David Ward, who will lead a tour of the “Poetic Likeness” exhibition at 6:00 p.m. in the G Street lobby (and, we hope, drop a few trivia hints!). Trivia begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Kogod Courtyard. The questions will cover all sorts of literary icons, like T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and Gertrude Stein, just to name a few. Pop Quiz can be played individually or in teams, and the top scorer will receive a prize at the end of the night.

Snacks and beverages will be available from the Courtyard Café for purchase. Here is a sneak peek at the ten-point bonus question for this month’s Pop Quiz: 

Robert Penn Warren (below) was a poet and novelist known for his involvement in the founding of the New Criticism literary movement. His most influential novel, All the King’s Men, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Vanderbilt, Warren’s alma matter, named its center for humanities after him. Warren was part of what southern group of poets?  

A.    The Movement  

B.    The Fugitives  

C.    The Rhymers’ Club  

D.   The Group

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery.

Robert Penn Warren / Conrad A. Albrizio / Oil on canvas, 1935 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Robert Penn Warren

Robert Lee Frost / Marcella Comès Winslow / Tempera and oil on artist-prepared board, 1952 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; partial gift of John Winslow and Mary Winslow Poole

George Washington: The First Face of America

George Washington was born 281 years ago today, February 22, 1732

Before the presidents, before Hollywood, and even before Elvis, there was George Washington.  The United States was a disunited smear of colonies along the east coast of a mighty land mass when men from cities, farms, hillsides, and swamps gathered under George Washington to fight off foreign rule.  In other words, before we were united, he united us.

Sure, there was a Continental Congress, and sure, there was the leadership of men like John Adams of Boston and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.  Both men would go on to be presidents just like George Washington, but neither man led troops into battle and neither man had the charisma to galvanize a disparate lot of colonists and to lead an unlikely army of poorly trained provincials to victory over the mightiest army on earth.  Only George Washington did that.

George Washington is almost beyond our recognition in the twenty-first century; perhaps that is why it is so critical to view the images of him and to ponder this man’s work.  How is he beyond recognition?  Washington, after serving his nation as a soldier and after winning a great victory over the British, was asked to serve his young country by being its first president.  He did not ask; he was ASKED.  In today’s America, presidential campaigns are waged like marketing wars and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on television advertising, image branding, and candidate polishing.

George Washington did not seek the office, and after two terms—remember that only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times was a Constitutional amendment ratified limiting the terms of the executive office to two—he voluntarily stepped down from the office which he could easily have turned into a throne. 

People wanted Washington in power; many people needed Washington in power to have confidence in the newly formed government.  The early federal government was a vague and faceless mass of unknowable components; had we not just thrown off the machinations of an unknowable governmental mass an ocean away? George Washington, on the other hand, was the first face of the revolution, a respected leader, and a man many of the new Americans trusted.

That Washington stepped down from office without being overthrown is significant.  Historian Michael H. Hart writes:

As can be seen from the history of many South American and African nations, it is all too easy for a new nation—even if it starts out with a democratic constitution—to soon degenerate into a military dictatorship.  While Washington was a firm enough leader to keep the new nation from disintegrating, he had no ambition to hold power indefinitely.  He did not wish to be either a king or a dictator, and he set a precedent for the peaceful relinquishment of power—a precedent which has been followed in the United States to this day.

And though we know this first president as the victor in a war, it is because, as Hart notes, this first president was able to change a government in peace that we give him our respect.  When one thinks of the corruption and the disrespect that has been seen in offices of public trust at most every level of American municipal, state, and federal governments, it is all the more stunning that George Washington’s impact on this nation is not more regularly invoked as model and method. 

Simply put, more often than not, he did the right thing and in doing so, affected not only the Americans of his own day, but all Americans living or dead since his day.

Washington was the first to hold the office, and the first to understand the potential for dynasties, tyrants, and political malfeasance.  He also understood that the highest office in the land should be occupied by one who treats that office with respect; also, that occupant must lead by example, show respect to all, and act with grace and diplomacy.  Washington understood all that, and, most importantly, he also knew when to yield the office.         

How do we pay homage to him?  First, the national capital is named after him.  There are also towns that take his name, and counties, colleges, universities and a state.  Washington monuments are located in many, many places, and the United States Treasury likes him so much that they preserve his image on both the quarter and the one dollar bill.

The National Portrait Gallery honors our first president in keeping George Washington’s portrait as its signature work, and as the first portrait one beholds upon entering America's Presidents.  Though many portraits in the collection are larger, it would be difficult to find a portrait more powerful than the Lansdowne portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart (above), the centerpiece of the first presidential gallery, and a national treasure in its own right.

With the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Portrait Gallery co-owns another work by Gilbert Stuart, the incomplete “Athenaeum” portrait, one of the few life sittings of Washington by any artist.  The NPG pays homage to President Washington in many other ways, with works in the collection by Charles Willson Peale, Rembrant Peale, and Jean-Antoine Houdon.            

The National Portrait Gallery also celebrates George Washington’s birth, February 22, 1732.  

Happy George Washington’s Birthday, America.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits

 

George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)/Gilbert Stuart, 1796/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery; acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation

 

Cited:
Hart, Michael H.  The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.  New  York: Citadel Press, 1992.   

Portrait of an Artist: Anne Harris

This is the eighth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Portrait (Red Robe) / Anne Harris / Oil on linen, 2008–12 / Collection of the artist, courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York City 

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Anne Harris. My family moved around a lot—Syracuse, Phoenix, Syracuse again, Tucson, Morehead, Kentucky, for high school. The longest place I’ve lived was Portland, Maine, from 1988 to 2001. Now I live in Riverside, Illinois, in the Chicago area.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: Painting: oil on linen, canvas, or sometimes wood panel.

Drawing: anything from watercolor to pastels to graphite to charcoal, etc., sometimes all at once.

Printmaking: Not very often—when I’m lucky and some wonderful printer wants to work with me.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: Technique both serves and is a by-product of creativity. That is, I’ve leaned to paint the paintings I need to paint. They’re built up in many layers, often translucent, like skin (I think about skin a lot), but I’m not systematic—no careful underpainting and calculated glazing.

I make a lot of changes. I don’t know where I’m going; I don’t have a final image in my head, but rather a broad idea, and a feeling I’m after, a kind of intensity.  I start a painting, waiting for it to look back at me. Then the painting tells me where to go. I usually get into trouble, take a wrong turn at some point and a lot happens, both bad and good, as I struggle out of the mess.

I work on paintings a long time, often for years. This isn’t because they technically require it, but because I keep going over a cliff—too contrived, too mundane, too much meaningless facility, or some nuts-and-bolts painting issue is giving me grief.

I often spend more time on the space around the figure than the figure itself. My “backgrounds” often physically sit in front of my foregrounds; the air the figure is embedded in is so fundamental—the difference between an academic exercise and a believable meaningful painting. I do love the juicy details, the indulgence of illusion, but they have to be essential, not just some facility demo.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

                    Photo by Terry Evans

A: I received a BFA in 1986 from Washington University in St. Louis. My MFA came from Yale in 1988.  Both are great schools—very challenging.  At Washington University, I learned that I could learn.  At Yale, I learned that I couldn’t paint, but again, that I could learn.

Also, I’ve been teaching in one form or another since 1988. I left full-time teaching when my son was small, but have kept my hand in it always. Currently, I teach undergraduate and graduate students at the School of the Art Institution of Chicago. I love it: the eclecticism, the high caliber of the students, my outstanding colleagues. It’s an incredible stretch for me and keeps me growing.

In addition, in the last few years, I’ve become involved with the Riverside Arts Center and serve on the board and exhibition committee. It’s a small, vital place with a school and gallery, started twenty years ago by members of the community and run mostly on volunteer firepower—this, combined with teaching, folds me into the energy of the Chicago arts community. It’s much too easy, working alone in my studio, to morph into a hermit (my natural state, maybe). When I poke my head out of my hole, there’s a lot going on.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: I worked on it off and on for four years. In fact, when I applied to this competition, it wasn’t finished (hopefully the updated image will make it onto this website).

This painting gave me a lot of trouble. While working on it, I realized I didn’t understand red. Oddly, I was having a tough time dealing with local color. I'm so used to using relative color (“no-name” color that only exists in context), which is supposed to be harder but . . . it’s like walking on a ship at sea: you get on dry land and fall over.

Also, problematic was a rather overbearing metaphor, which initially I tried to paint around but then gave in to. Let’s just say Judy Chicago would be pleased.

My hopes for it are that the viewer will find it powerful, will look at it for a long time, perhaps also find it funny—but not too funny—and disconcerting.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: Better to just have you take a look at it, but to sum it up simplistically, I’ve been painting the same freaky self-portrait for the last twenty-five years. And I draw, a lot, always from life.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I’m working on a group of paintings for a gallery show in New York City this coming April.

Also, I just finished the first stage of a collaborative drawing project called The Mind’s I at Julius Caesar, an alternative not-for-profit gallery, another small vital place in Chicago (run by four artists). This is very different for me: I’ve wanted for some time to start a conversation about the complexities of perception, self-perception, and drawing.

I invited a broad range of artists—from conceptual to figurative, young to old, self-taught to top-of-the-art-world—to draw self-portraits with me over the course of a month. The show consisted of the work made during that time. Essentially, the drawings “conversed” amongst each other on the wall, while the artists conversed amongst each other as they drew.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: It’s gotten more overtly fictitious but also more perceptual. I know that seems like a contradiction. I think, also, it’s become subtler.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: I don’t have one. There are many. But there are certain paintings I visit over and over. I teach right next to the AIC, and there’s a weeping Madonna by Dieric Bouts (they demoted it to “workshop of” a few years ago, but they’re wrong. It’s too subtle and intense, and the pentimento—do they actually think some assistant changed the length of her fingertips?). 

I don’t tend to look at art based on subject matter, style, or even century. It’s a particular presence, a mesmerizing quality. So, I might go from the Bouts to Ad Reinhardt or Vija Celmins or Rubens’s The Capture of Samson (an exquisite oil sketch). I love Rembrandt’s Lucretia in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Duccio at the Met, and when I come to D.C., I visit Ginevra de’ Benci.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: I’d like to be invisible in Rembrandt’s studio. Just let me watch.

Q: What inspires you?

A: People who go for broke. My students inspire me. They’re so intense, so excited, so in the “I didn’t know I could do this” mode.  My husband inspires me—he makes brave work, filled with grace (he’s in this show too—Paul D’Amato). Long-haul artists who keep growing inspire me. My son’s sweetness and sense of humor . . . cripes. This is a hard question. I think when I was younger I would have just said great art and doers of good deeds, but inspiration is more complicated when you’ve lived a while.

Invisible (cropped) / Anne Harris / Oil on linen, 27 x 24 in., 2012 / Courtesy of Alexandre Gallery, photo by Tom Van Eynde

Fifty Years Ago Today, February 11, 1963: The Death of Sylvia Plath

Settling into the middle of the twentieth century, the confessional poets wrote deeply personal passages in which they fought their demons and exposed their fears; they omitted few details. The confessional poets played out their psychological conflicts in front of their reading audience, baring the thoughts that often tormented them, seeking catharsis through this poetic purging.

If the confessionals had a queen, it was Sylvia Plath—although some might contend that Anne Sexton had a longer and darker rule—and Plath took her place at the top of the brooding crowd. Plath explored suicide in poetry and in life. In her widely read poem Lady Lazarus (published posthumously in 1965), she flirts with the theme of death.

Dying
Is an art, like
everything else.
I do it exceptionally
well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call...

As many critics and Plathians have noted, the poet dissected her life and feelings in what must have been periods of tumultuous anxiety and intense despair. Today she is celebrated as a poet, certainly, but also as an icon of the displaced and sensitive poetic soul. Recently, we spoke to the National Portrait Gallery’s Dorothy Moss, assistant curator of painting and sculpture, and David Ward, historian and curator of the current NPG exhibition "Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets."  

Q:  Sylvia Plath not only stayed with us, but her reputation has increased greatly since her death.  Why is this?

Dorothy Moss:  Plath once wrote in a letter to her mother, “I have a visual imagination.” As an art historian, what I find so fascinating is that her influence extends well beyond the literary world. The power of her vivid descriptions in her prose and confessional poetry (a genre she advanced) has influenced generations of writers and visual artists.

In addition, it is important to keep in mind that at the time she was writing, Plath had to navigate societal expectations of women as wives and mothers. While being married to a successful writer, supporting his work, and caring for their young children, she forged a powerful literary identity, secured her own voice, wrote prolifically, and published her work. Despite her personal challenges, Plath’s poetry and prose remain relevant and continue to speak to generations of writers and visual artists in the United States and around the world. Interest in Plath’s work since her death in 1963 has been extraordinary. Her poems and stories have been translated into thirty languages.

Q:  Her poetry is dark and certain words come to mind when reading it—angst, despair, alienation.  Do you think Sylvia Plath’s style and words were the foundation for today's American gothic youth? 

David Ward: Hmmm. That’s a really interesting question you’re drawing there! I don’t think there’s a direct connection—for one thing Plath was always ferociously ambitious as a poet, and her opposition to the world played itself internally and psychologically—leading, in ways we can’t really ever finally understand, to her suicide. I also get the sense that she always was pretty solitary in temperament—not a joiner.

Insofar as I understand goths there’s more of a tribal sense of community—a banding together against the world as it is. Moreover, there’s the costuming: Plath was always conventionally dressed—sweater and pearls and twin set—and not prone even to the black stockings and outfits of the beatniks, let alone the full goth regalia; you can’t imagine Plath getting a tattoo.

But I think temperamentally and culturally both manifest a sense of alienation and rebellion, alienation that is particularly strong when you’re coming of age. I do think that Plath, in her angst and anger at her parents (particularly her poor old dad!), is a text for those who came after her—particularly, of course, young women.

Q: Can you tell us a little about the portrait of Plath that is in the NPG collection and the exhibition, "Poetic Likeness"?

Dorothy Moss:  Rollie McKenna’s portrait visually exudes the enticing mysteriousness of Plath that still intrigues generations of writers and artists. Her thoughtful, inscrutable expression, particularly the searching look in her eyes, captures the essence of a young woman whose fierce imagination provided her a rich and complex interior life—a life of the mind that still captivates her readers.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Sylvia Plath / Rollie McKenna / Gelatin silver print, 1959 (printed later) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna; © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation

 

Portrait of an Artist: Rieko Fujinami

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Id17 - Ambivalent indignation / Rieko Fujinami, 2012 / Painting on mirror: 16.5 x 12”

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Rieko Fujinami.  I was born in Kisarazu, Japan in 1960 and have lived in Beacon, New York since 2003.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I work in many different media including etching, copper tempera, frottage/drawing, fresco secco, encaustic, drawing and painting on clear film or mirror, glass painting, and digital imaging.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: When I create acrylic mirror drawings, I use acrylic mirror as the base.  I begin by creating an environment representing the outside world on acrylic mirror using two or three different kinds of white pigment mixed with alcohol, and I use this mixture to paint on the mirror.  I then paint an abstract image, representing the inside world, using two or three different kinds of black pigment.

The black and white pigments influence each other and create the feeling of order evolving out of chaos.  I move the wet pigments around with the pressure of an alcohol atomizer while tilting the mirror panel.  While waiting for it to dry completely I carefully remove some of the pigment using soft dry brushes.  I add a fixative, wait 24 hours, and then I add a layer of glass primer and clear acrylic gesso.  After that dries I draw a representational image on the front of the mirror using a combination of acrylic paint and pastel.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: When I was young I studied classic techniques like fresco, tempera and copper etching, and I both loved and hated it.  I struggled a lot and never got excellent work, or the teacher’s appreciation, because I felt restricted by the rules.  Later, though, those skills gave me many ideas for my imagination as I created new techniques of my own.

After high school I studied fresco and tempera with Toru Kaneko, a Tokyo artist.  I attended Zoukei Art University, in Tokyo, where I graduated in 1984, and received my graduate degree from Tama Art University in 1986, where I specialized in copper etching.   My earliest professional work was in copper etching and drawing on washi paper.  In 1989 I started to develop my own technique for contemporary frescos when I was asked to do the cover for an avant-garde music CD.

In 1998 the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs awarded me the Best Art of the Year Selection, for the fresco Book of Emptiness which was purchased for the Japan National Modern Art Museum collection.

I have had over 60 one-person exhibitions of fresco, etching and copper tempera in Japan.  After I moved to the United States in 2003 I began creating paintings on film and mirror with dry pigment.  I received the NYFA Artist Fellowship Award in 2007.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: One of my collectors recommended that I apply for the competition.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: This painting is a portrait of my friend, Aki, who is a well-known underground artist in Japan.  From my late twenties until I moved to the United States at age 42 we shared many times together drinking, talking of art, and engaging in the eccentric behaviors of the avant-garde groups to which she introduced me.  Soon after I came to America she became pregnant, married and had a daughter.  I was very surprised that she chose a very traditional Japanese style of marriage.  She moved into the house of her husband’s family, sharing in their life-style, and raising her child while attempting to continue her artwork.

Historically, in Japanese thinking, a woman before marriage had to follow her father’s decisions, after marriage she was expected to follow her husband, and when elderly follow her children.  Usually a woman joined her husband’s family and would work for her husband and his parents and learn the traditions of her husband’s family.  Marriage was more between families than between individuals.  It was very difficult for a woman to have her own life or career under these conditions.  Since the 1970s many young contemporary women have tried to reject this idea, but it still remains a big part of the culture.

When I returned to Japan on visits my friend would invite me to her family’s home where I found a wonderful family, nice environment, and a lovely baby.  But looking at her I found a deep unspoken ambivalence in her eyes, face, and movements that she couldn’t recognize in herself.  On the surface there was love and calmness, cooperation and harmony, but underneath that I saw complex layers of ambivalence and struggle between love and irritation, calm and impatience, passion and resignation.

I determined to make a portrait both of this struggle within a close and dear friend, and as a broader symbol of the struggle of women to survive between cooperating with the social systems of contemporary life and finding our own lives.

Q: Can you tell us about your larger body of work?

A: My artwork’s principal subject has always been the human being.  I have made portraits of family and friends, anonymous persons I’ve seen on the street, or created faces and bodies, either individually or groups of people in imaginary situations.  I also make subjects of plants and imaginary landscapes as a metaphor for human life.

Q: What are you currently working on?

The “Id” series is a group of imaginary faces, using drawing on acrylic mirror, which departs from the realistic expression of my previous work.  I‘m working to explore the deeper unconscious areas of my imagination by moving my painting action to a place between the intentional and the accidental; to focus on the excitement of discovery rather than the perfection of details. 

The particle flow on mirrored surface creates a space of no distance, no direction, just a floating in unconsciousness.  The mirror space contains a subtle connection to the world outside its surface, and becomes an ambiguous space.  The faces I paint come from unrecognized memory.  

I try to blank my thoughts, and let elements from my mind bubble up with no pre-judgment of the correctness of the process or the result.  We try too hard to insist that everything be rationally understood, but don’t want to see our own shadows deep inside the mind.  The faces in my work come from there, but because they are built on that very important part of the mind, I feel at peace with them.  I hope the viewer can have a non-verbal conversation and relationship with the work without the safety net of rational recognition.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: While the media that I use have changed many times over the years, my subject has largely remained portrayal of human beings, either real or imaginary.

My early etching work represents a nostalgic illusion of my childhood fears with a longing for Western fantasy.  Later I began to develop subjects inspired by mythology and literature using washi paper and wood board.

In 1989 I made three etchings with Tiananmen Square Massacre themes.  In 1991 I made two frescos with Gulf War themes.  At that time I started making the subject of social consciousness part of my work. In 1992 I had my first exhibition consisting only of fresco secco works.  The exhibition title was “Between Being and Non-being”. That theme has become a philosophical base of my work even now.

After the 1995 Kobe earthquake I made the “Allere” series of four etchings, and began the “Anonymous 50” series of etchings of 50 faces that was completed in 2005.  In 1999 I had an exhibition of copper tempera works whose motif was imaginary plants and landscapes as an allegory of humankind.

In 2000, I begin to study digital techniques and to use the computer for some of my work. I moved to New York in 2003 and found myself straggling and struggling about everything in my new country.  In 2004, I learned photo gravure and created the portfolio, “Locus”, each of which combined a botanical image with my own poem for a quiet message of sadness over the 911 terror and the Iraq War.  I developed a technique for drawing on clear film in 2006, and began making portraits of real persons using film drawing, including the “Black Rain, Black Water” series.  In 2007 I returned to fresco secco, continuing to make portraits of real persons using friends and family for models.

My “Wanderer” series of digital photomontages, in 2009, created landscapes from a short trip in the unconsciousness of an imaginary near-death experience.  In 2010 I began painting directly onto acrylic mirror, creating the “Infant” series, ten portraits of very young children caught in the time before they developed speech. 

I then began the “Id” series in which I combined painting on film and on mirror and attached the painted film to the painted mirror surface.  For this group I wanted to keep my feeling loose and attempt to connect to my unconscious using an automatic drawing style.

In 2011 the 3-11 tragedy in Japan interrupted that work, and I began the “Requiem for our Silence” series using painting on mirror to express my reaction to the plight of my home country.

After such a deeply emotional time, I needed more realistic work to recover my identity, so I made “AKI”, the work I entered into the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. and continued work on my ”Id“ series.

In 2012 I began “Allegory of Herbarium”, a series of botanical digital photos using mixed media, because I sometimes need to step back from the direct wordless expression of my portraits and create a more indirect metaphorical story using photography and digital tools to construct plant and landscape collages.

I’m now working on 2013 exhibition in Japan in collaboration with the poet Hideharu Ogawa’s work ”Nirvana”, and a solo exhibition featuring my “Id” series.

Q: What inspires you?

Watching people.  Moving water and the traces and stains left by it.  Books on psychology and mythology.  Watching/listening to the news of the world around me.  As a Japanese person I’m fascinated by American and British TV series like Treme, West Wing, House, Prime Suspect, Doc Martin.

Synchronous / Rieko Fujinami, 2005 / Fresco secco: 50 x 63”

Losing to Win: Rosa Parks at 100

First, she lost her bus seat. Next, she lost the court case over her right to keep that bus seat. Then, she lost her job because she represented change in the legal and social order of the Jim Crow South. Rosa Parks lost a lot. Her husband, Raymond, was compelled to leave his job—his employer refused to allow Rosa’s name to be mentioned at work—and the couple was forced to move to Detroit to find employment. However, in the end, what Parks lost for herself mattered little to her. She understood what was at stake by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man; she knew there would be better days for all once everyone got past this poor moment.

Rosa Parks had been schooled in the ways of segregation all her life, and she also had a formal, learned knowledge of the practices of nonviolent civil disobedience. If that was not enough, she had come to further understand the struggles of blacks in the South in her work with the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rosa Parks, otherwise a quiet and unassuming seamstress, was an informed Jim Crow lawbreaker.

Though she understood the abject paradox of the system within which she lived, it was not her intention to become the center and the symbol of an American justice movement. Historian Douglas Brinkley notes, “Rosa Parks did not wake up on the morning of December 1, 1955, primed for a showdown over civil rights with the local police.” However, she had had quite enough mistreatment at the hands of her fellow citizens. Brinkley adds, “But when a white man tried to use an unfair system to determine her dignity, Rosa Parks realized that it was her burden to stay put.”

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television . . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

The sum of King’s thoughts were going through Parks’s mind on December 1, 1955, even though it would be another seven years before he wrote them. When she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus, Rosa Parks was about to begin losing. By the time she finished losing, the world would know her name, and African Americans bound by racist doctrine for scores of generations would soon begin to win back some of the rights bestowed upon all humans simply because of their humanity. All this happened because a quiet woman knew that the first loss—her smaller loss—would ultimately be the seed out of which the greater victory would grow.

Rosa Parks, who died in Detroit in 2005, was born in 1913, one hundred years ago on this date, February 4.  

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits

Cited:

Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000)

Rosa Parks / Marshall D. Rumbaugh / 1983 / painted limewood / With Base: 99.1 x 96.5 x 30.5cm (39 x 38 x 12") Without Base: 94 x 88.9 x 18.4cm (37 x 35 x 7 1/4") / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Portrait of an Artist: Neil Shigley

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Photo by Carlos Richarson

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: My name is Neil Shigley, and I was born in Columbus, Ohio to a military family. I lived in Europe,  Asia, and several places in the United States growing up, and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. I now live in San Diego.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I work in a number of mediums. The portrait for this exhibition is a block print. Along with printmaking, I paint with acrylics and oils, draw with graphite and charcoal, and make sculptural work in concrete and steel.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: The portrait of Michael 67 (Pastor Shelby) is a block-print image. In my portrait work, my focus is to capture the likeness of an individual by using descriptive marks to describe how light hits the forms of the face.

My dream for each portrait is to, in some small way, touch on the human condition. Each portrait starts with a walk around various areas of San Diego, where I talk to people living on the street. I approach them with a great deal of respect. Even though they don’t have a home, they still have a space that is theirs. As an artist I am looking for interesting characters.

When I see someone who intrigues me, I approach them and explain to them that I am an artist and would like to do a portrait of them. Some say yes, some say no. If they agree, I spend some time talking to them about their life, their history, their plans, their dreams, and why they are on the streets.

I take one to two photographs; I don’t try to set the photos up in any way except that they are facing into the light, because I am looking for the most honest portrayal that I can get. From the photo I do a number of drawings.

Once I am satisfied with a drawing, I blow it up to the size of the piece of Plexiglas that will be carved, usually about 36 x 48 inches. I place the drawing behind the Plexiglas and begin carving, using a flexible shaft drill. The carving takes six to eight hours per sheet. The carved Plexiglas is then rolled with ink.

I place a piece of paper over it and rub it by hand to transfer the ink on to the paper. When the ink is dry, I soak the paper in water then adhere it with matt medium to canvas that is stretched over a wood panel. When the piece is dry, I trim the excess paper.

At the top of the piece, I hand-write the name, age, place where I met the sitter, the year, and number of the print, along with my signature. At the bottom of the image, I hand-paint a symbol that is one of many that were used by drifters in the 1930s in the U.S. to relay information about a place to other drifters who may pass that way later. The symbol I choose relates in some way to the individual portrayed.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

          Photo by Sara Shaheen

A: Being part of a military family I moved a lot as a child. We lived in France, Korea and several places in the United States. My father was very artistic, as was my older brother. I was exposed to the art and culture of everywhere we lived and traveled. That, along with watching my father drawing and painting, is the foundation of my life as an artist.

I majored in painting and printmaking at San Diego State University. There, my work was mostly abstract. I went on to get my degree with distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I majored in illustration and fell in love with wood-block printing.

After graduating, I moved to the New York City area and began a career as an illustrator and fine artist. During my career as an illustrator, I was commissioned many times to make portraits for magazines and other media.

After I moved back to San Diego in 1990, I transitioned to fine art and began teaching. I taught at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, then eventually at San Diego State University, where I currently teach drawing and illustration. I also teach drawing, illustration, and life drawing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.

Our life experiences are what enables us and maybe confines us to our artistic expression. I know that my experiences have brought me to the place that I am now with my work. My initial inspiration was watching my father create and feeling his interest and passion for the art and culture of wherever he was at. My education gave me the skills and confidence to pursue my artistic ideas. My career as an illustrator gave me so much experience creating work and specifically portraits. My teaching has honed all of it by forcing me to talk about and refine my ideas.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I received a flyer about the competition. When I saw it, I knew that I had to enter. I remember thinking that to be recognized by this competition would in some way validate this series of portraits of the homeless. I had been working on this series for several years and felt strongly about the value of getting the work out there, especially on a national level, so that more people would be presented the opportunity to contemplate the issue of chronic homelessness.

I cannot express the honor and joy to have been selected as a semifinalist, not to mention a finalist.

 Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: I met the subject of the portrait that is part of this exhibition, Michael—or as he wanted to be called, “Pastor Shelby”—the week after Christmas 2011. I was walking in downtown San Diego, in an area where there are many people living on the street. I had a small backpack with my camera and a sketchbook.

When I came across Pastor Shelby, he was sweeping a small area of the sidewalk with a branch. I was immediately struck by his energy and spirit—happy, confident, and direct. He had a little area that he had set up between the sidewalk and a chain-link fence. He had a tarp as a roof and blankets as sidewalls and a back wall. His belongings were neatly stacked; he had a rug as a floor and had even fashioned a chair with a piece of wood attached to a tree across the sidewalk facing his bed.

The space that he had created was much more organized than most I have seen; it impressed me. I stopped and said hello and introduced myself as an artist. He greeted me very directly with a big smile and put me at ease immediately by saying that he was an artist and loved drawing.

I asked if I could a portrait of him and he agreed enthusiastically. He asked me if I wanted to sit and pointed to his chair. We sat and talked for a while. His enthusiasm for life was inspiring; he seemed to be truly happy.

I asked how long he had lived on the streets and he told me that he had been out there for many years. When I asked him how he deals with the elements he said, “I AM THE ELEMENTS.” Why are you here, I asked. He answered, “I need to be here! . . . There are people here that need me, I help them.” He felt his place was in the street, where he could minister to the people there, people who needed a hand or needed help or needed counseling. After talking for a while, I asked to take his picture, which he agreed to, but only after he brushed his hair. I took two photos that day that I would work from.

When I completed the portrait I looked for him to show it to him, but I never found him. I asked around and some people thought that they had seen him but couldn’t say for sure. That is the way things are on the street—being homeless means just that. Where do you look for someone without a home?

Pastor Shelby inspired me and changed me a little bit. His enthusiasm, his happiness, his commitment to helping people has made me want to do more for people and appreciate the things that I have, and the people who are in my life.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I am currently working on more portraits in this series with plans for several exhibits in the near future. Along with the block prints, like the portrait of Michael, I am doing some large-scale graphite portraits.

Q: What inspires you?

A: Many things inspire me: my wife and family, my students, fellow artists, the character of people anywhere and everywhere. The list goes on. The common denominator of any work that I do is that I am inspired, consumed, and lost in the process of creating the work. When I’m done, I move on to the next.

The moment-by-moment activity of making art, of contemplating art, is where I find the most joy. It’s interesting to me that when I am done with a piece, I become the viewer like everyone else who looks at it. Sometimes a work of art takes on a life of its own. As an artist, I think the greatest honor I could have is to have a piece of my work touch someone in some way.

Luther 49 / Neil Shigley, 2008 / Plexiglass block print on paper, mounted on canvas, 72 x 48 x 2 in.

Pop Quiz: Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Stay

C’mon, Everybody! Put on your Blue Suede Shoes and Walk This Way for an evening of rock-and-roll trivia. Hopefully you’ll get some Satisfaction and Won’t Get Fooled Again.

This month’s Pop Quiz takes place on January 31 at 6:30 p.m. in the Kogod Courtyard and will look at the gods and goddesses of rock who reside in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. This trivia night will test your knowledge of icons such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elvis, The Boss, and more. Pop Quiz can be played individually or in teams, and the high scorer receives a prize at the end of the evening.

The Courtyard Café will be open, and snacks and beverages will be available for purchase. Here is a sneak peek at the 10-point bonus question for this month’s Pop Quiz:

Before her tragic death of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven, Janis Joplin had become a female rock icon. Known for her raspy and bluesy singing voice, she rose to fame late in the 1960’s as a psychedelic funk artist. Though she is generally known as a solo singer, she began her career singing for Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later went solo with her backup bands. Which of the following was one Joplin’s backup bands?

A. The Famous Flames
B. The Comets
C. Kozmic Blues Band
D. None of the Above

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery. On February 27, please join us for Pop Quiz: “Poetic Likeness.” Curator David Ward will lead special tour of the “Poetic Likeness” exhibition (and perhaps drop a few hints for Pop Quiz); trivia begins in the Kogod Courtyard at 6:30 p.m. To participate in the tour, meet in the G Street lobby at 6:00 p.m.

Elvis Presley / Ralph Wolfe Cowan (born 1931) / Oil on canvas, 1976–88 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of R. W. Cowan

Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin, James Gurley, Peter Albin, Samuel Andrew, and David Getz) / Color lithorgraph poster, 1967 / Victor Moscoso / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Stan Musial, 1920 – 2013

Stan Musial, one of the greatest baseball players of the twentieth century, was born in Donora, Pennsylvania, a small town south of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. Recalling his home and his family in his 1969 Baseball Hall of Fame inauguration speech, Musial noted, “The Musials were poor people then, like so many of our friends in Donora, Pennsylvania. But I never felt like I wanted for anything because I had a baseball. My first toy was a baseball.” And though Donora may have been the birthplace for this great man of baseball, it was St. Louis, Missouri, that played host to Musial’s talent.

The numbers, of course, do not tell the story of the man, but in the instance of Stan Musial, the numbers go a long way toward explaining a great career. For instance, in 1946 Musial had more at-bats than in any other year of his twenty-two-year career. It was certainly a stellar year for him, as he carried a .365 batting average and had 228 hits, 50 of which were doubles. In that same year, he recorded only 31 strikeouts.

By contrast, every year of the sixteen years Babe Ruth had more than 350 at-bats, he had at least 50 strikeouts; in half of those years he had more than 80 strikeouts. In the eighteen years Musial had at least 350 at-bats, he never recorded more than 50 strike-outs in a season and only went over 40 during three seasons.

Stan Musial could also get on base. In 12,717 lifetime at-bats, he carried a .331 average—he batted his way to base almost one in every three times at the plate. Again, however, the numbers only tell part of the story. Musial was a gentleman and an athlete; he served his country in World War II, he lived a scandal-free life, and he enriched baseball by appreciating the sport and playing it superlatively.

Although his family in Donora was skeptical in his early days about playing a sport as a vocation, Musial became not only one of baseball’s supreme hitters, but also one of its greatest ambassadors. Stan Musial died on January 19 at the age of ninety-two.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Stanley Frank Musial / Boris Chaliapin / Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper illustration board, undated / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin, ©2008 Estate of Helcia Chaliapin

Another Brilliant Naval Victory: Commodore William Bainbridge by Rembrandt Peale

William Bainbridge / Rembrandt Peale / Oil on canvas, c. 1814 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

By Matthew Brenckle, historian and guest writer from the USS Constitution Museum in Boston, Massachusetts

When USS Constitution sailed from Boston for South American waters at the end of October 1812, the 480 men and boys on board had no idea they’d return home as national heroes. America had been at war with Great Britain since the middle of June, but despite some early naval victories, the war had been going badly for the United States.

As Constitution cleared Boston Light and met the first Atlantic swells, a tall man dressed in blue and gold paced the quarterdeck. He held in his hands the fates of all those on board. The sailors could be forgiven if they looked apprehensive when they thought of what the next few months might bring. Their captain enjoyed a less-than-brilliant reputation.

Born in Princeton, New Jersey, William Bainbridge (1774–1833) entered the fledgling United States Navy as a lieutenant in 1798. Years spent sailing on merchant voyages to Europe and the West Indies had honed his seamanship, and as the Quasi-War with France heated up, the Navy gave Bainbridge command of the 18-gun schooner Retaliation.

Unfortunately, during a cruise off Antigua, the little warship fell in with a French squadron and the young captain surrendered without firing a shot. To add to the ignominy, this was the very first ship lost by the United States Navy.

Exonerated for the defeat, he subsequently received command of the frigate George Washington. Tasked with carrying a cargo of tribute from the United States to the Dey of Algiers, Bainbridge once again found himself embroiled in an unhappy situation. The Dey, eager to curry favor with his superior in Constantinople, ordered Bainbridge to transport his embassy there in the George Washington; refusal on the part of the Americans would lead to open war. Adding insult to the humiliation, the Dey required the ship to sail under the Algerian flag.

At home, reactions to the situation were mixed, but in the end, Captain Bainbridge escaped with his career intact. American relations with the Barbary States of North Africa deteriorated, and Bainbridge returned to the Mediterranean in command of the frigate Philadelphia.

On October 31, 1803, as the Americans chased a Tripolitan ship into Tripoli Harbor, the Philadelphia ran aground on an unmarked shoal. All attempts to float it off proved futile, and as enemy gunboats swarmed around, Bainbridge reluctantly hauled down the American flag. The Tripolitans freed the ship and carried her into Tripoli, where Stephen Decatur subsequently destroyed her in a daring night raid. Philadelphia’s crew went straight into a Tripolitan prison.

After his release and return to the United States in 1805, Bainbridge was somehow, miraculously, cleared of negligence again. Yet his career ground to a halt in the peacetime navy. He went on furlough to try his fortune in the merchant fleet but returned from a foreign voyage as rumors of war began to grow.

In September 1812, he assumed command of Constitution from Captain Isaac Hull, who had just led the ship to victory over HMS Guerrière, and in October he sailed from Boston with orders to “afford protection to our trade & to annoy the enemy."

Absolution for his past failures came on the afternoon of December 29, 1812. Off the coast of Brazil, Constitution encountered HMS Java (47 guns) under the command of Captain Henry Lambert. Bainbridge put his seamanship to the test as the ships maneuvered to gain an advantageous position. Early in the action, a British shot shattered Constitution’s helm, leaving the ship temporarily out of control and embedding a piece of shrapnel in Bainbridge’s thigh.

Despite his wound, he stayed on deck to direct the action. The quick-firing American gun crews battered their opponent into submission, and the British ensign finally fluttered down about three-and-a-half hours after the first shots were fired.

A model of the Constitution, on display in our exhibition "1812: A Nation Emerges" / Wood, 1920–21 / U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C.

When Constitution dropped anchor in Boston in February 1813, Americans everywhere hailed Bainbridge and his crew as heroes. Leading citizens in cities from Portland, Maine, to Washington, D.C., threw elaborate dinner parties for the captain and his officers, and bestowed valuable gifts of silver and gold. Congress authorized $50,000 worth of “prize money” to be distributed among the crew and ordered a commemorative medal struck—solid gold for Captain Bainbridge and silver for the other commissioned officers. Despite these awards, Bainbridge wrote to a friend that “the applause of my countrymen has for me greater charms than all the gold that glitters.”

Rembrandt Peale’s brush joined in the general ebullience. Peale captured the essence of his sitter, depicting him in his full dress uniform perfectly. The commodore’s eyes seem to sparkle with joy at his newfound fame.

According to an early biographer, “Com. Bainbridge . . . was six feet in height, and had a finely molded and muscular frame, which enabled him to endure any amount of fatigue. His complexion was rather fair, his beard dark and strong, his eyes black, animated, and expressive. His deportment was commanding, his dress always neat; his temperament was ardent and somewhat impetuous, though he could qualify it with the greatest courtesy and the most attractive amenity.” 

Bainbridge’s naval career continued for another twenty-one years, until a bout of pneumonia laid him low. In his last hours “he called for his sword and pistols, . . . and ordered that all hands be called to board the enemy.” This time, he would only strike his flag to Death.

View of "1812: A Nation Emerges"

Portrait of an Artist: Gwen Hardie

This is the fifth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Face 11.27.06 (after Ginevra de Benci by Leonardo Da Vinci), 2006, oil on canvas, 23 x 23 in.

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Gwen Hardie. I grew up in the Scottish countryside of Aberdeenshire, and I studied at Edinburgh College of Art. I moved to New York in 2000, after living in London and Berlin. I currently live in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: Oil paint, pen, pencil, and conte drawings. 

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: I work quickly with oil paint mixed with linseed oil and Gamsol. The paint is thinned to a consistency where I can manipulate it to form a smooth film in one painting session. Within this oil film are blended warm and cool colors that create a three-dimensional illusion of skin.

I reject a large proportion of the work, but each reject spurs on a new version until I get what I am looking for. My process was recently the subject of the film Slow Looking—Fast Painting by Charlotte Lagarde, 

Every painting is titled by the day on which it was painted—this way I can keep track of many variations on a theme. Oil paint has a legacy of creating an illusion of luminous “skin”; I take this aspect of oil painting into a contemporary language by magnifying and decontextualising the skin, while observing from life.

Drawings help me to reinvent and imagine the painting as a thing in itself, the topographical structure underlying the form, its interconnecting contours seen from various perspectives and vantage points.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art—classical training based on observation of the live model. It was a humbling experience to study the model and seemed to me much more than an academic exercise. The seeds of my current practice developed there.

I was able to see through the person in a sense, and found that the act of observation over time enabled me to explore themes of personal and collective identity and to ask questions in my art about our boundaries. The surface of the human body, what it reveals about the inner world of the person, and how it relates to the world outside of us in the greater scheme of things is extremely compelling.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I saw it on the New York Foundation for the Arts website and was attracted to the premise of creating a contemporary portrait based on observation. 

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: Body 10.27.11 (which means I painted it on October 27, 2011) is a magnification of the skin above my heart and lungs. I chose this for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition because I associate it with the area which we press our hands to when we say emphatically “Me”?! I wanted to portray this area within the traditional oval cameo portrait format as an extended play on the idea of the portrait. 

Q: Can you also tell us about your larger body of work?

A: For the last five years I have been developing and exploring a project of magnifications of the body image, at times increasing or decreasing the degree to which the area is identifiable or ambiguous while drawing associations to the greater natural world.

In the magnified world of close-up observation, a curve in space can appear like the curve of the earth from a high vantage point or equally a microscopic view of a cell. The project took a leap forward conceptually when I presented the body image on tondos and ovals.  

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: The underside of the breast, which is the most spherical area of the (female) body! I like the interplay of two and three dimensional space between the flat tondo/oval and the spherical illusion. In the summer I started a series in small scale of this at the Saltonstall Foundation. The last image I made there spurred on this current series, which adds the color viridian to the darkest part of this underside curve. An example of this is the picture below. 

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: My paintings have always centered on representations of the human body in one way or another. . . . However, I used to change the approach/technique many times, perhaps sensing that I had not found a strong enough reason to work in this or that way.

In the last decade, however, my focus on technique and magnification has become more sustaining in that smaller differences between works and approaches seem critical, stimulating, and demanding of further exploration. I am mining a deeper vein at present, to use an appropriate metaphor!

 Q: Who is your favorite artist? If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Leonardo da Vinci. I would observe and study his “sfumato” technique, which blends warm and cool colors to create an illusion of things close up and far away. He happens also to be the oldest known vegetarian, which I would love to ask him about.

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: Coincidently, one of my favorite artworks happens to be here in the National Gallery in Washington: Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci portrait, which was the subject of a project I did at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy in 2006.

Q: What inspires you?

A: The possibility to understand life from an ever-widening perspective and to make deeper connections to others. 

Body 11.21.12, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches.

 

Portrait of an Artist: Heidi Fancher

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Dr. Mamie & Kenneth Clark Experiment / Heidi Fancher, 2011 / Duratrance print illuminated by light box: 11 x 14 in.

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: My name is Heidi Fancher; I currently reside in Washington, DC. I have recently relocated back to DC from Georgia.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I take an interdisciplinary approach to my work. I work in painting, drawing, sculpture, video, photography, and textiles. Currently I am working with discarded technology to create new, expressive tools. This is often a challenge, as parts become hard to find and technology standards change.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: I have two parts to my creative process. The first part is research. I study primary source material on the subject matter that I am interested in. The second part is to scour archives for visual and audio materials that will inform my research and that further inspire me.

Living in Washington is a perfect match for my creative process, because it has some of the best archival sources. Very often I will also visit the place that I am researching.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I have a BFA in photography and an MFA in photography/electronic media. I have also worked as a photographic archivist.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I saw the 2009 show and was inspired!

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

 A: The piece I submitted for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is titled For Delia. In 2004 a friend invited me to view a collection of daguerreotypes at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. I saw all of the daguerreotypes within that collection but it was the daguerreotype of Delia that captivated me. Her gaze is penetrating. I have been obsessed with her ever since. After viewing the portrait, I wanted to give Delia a voice.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: My body of work thus far has been about giving voice to those who have traditionally been shut out of the American conversation by the majority culture due to their ethnicity, sex, and race.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: While in Georgia, I lived across the street from the Georgia Historical Society. I spent two years scouring their archive. From that research I have begun to weave narratives of the people who settled there. I am currently putting together a body of work that employs video, photography, sound sculpting, and sculptural pieces.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: This is a difficult question to answer because I feel that I have always been employing multiple mediums in my work. Perhaps, looking backward, my work is more focused now than it was when I was younger.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.

A: The seeds for all my work came from my introduction to the photographic archives.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: This is a difficult question for me, my favorite artist changes often—right now I love the work of Caravaggio. I admire his use of chiaroscuro. I also admire the work of Terence Koh and Lusi Gispert.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: London–born artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: Ever is Over All by Pipilotti Rist.

Q: What inspires you?

A: I am inspired by people’s stories, their lives, their hopes, and their histories.

 

From the Kitchens of America, Happy 100th Birthday to President Richard M. Nixon

The thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994), was born in Yorba Linda, California, on this date, January 9. After attending Whittier College and Duke University law school, Nixon began his service to his country in World War II. After the war, he rose through the ranks of American politics, serving in the House of Representatives, the United States Senate, as vice president, and ultimately as president.

Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s choice for a running-mate in 1952. Although he was only thirty-nine years old, Nixon’s public exposure had increased during his time on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Riding this wave propelled him to the Senate in 1950 and to the second spot on the Republican ticket with the immensely popular Ike.

Though the Cold War continued to spread ice over the United States’ relations with the Soviet Union during the Eisenhower administrations, Vice President Nixon chose to illustrate the sublime American lifestyle in an interesting exchange with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Pitting the standards of American living against those of the Soviet Union, Nixon discussed the magnificence and ease with which American households operated when he appeared in Moscow in 1959. The following portion of the “Kitchen Debate” transcript is from the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified documents library (PDF transcript, video part 1, video part 2):
 
[Both men enter kitchen in the American exhibit.]

Nixon: I want to show you this kitchen. It is like those of our houses in California.

[Nixon points to dishwasher.]

Khrushchev: We have such things.

Nixon: This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units fordirect installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women . . .

Khrushchev: Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.

Nixon: I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives. . . This house can be bought for $14,000, and most American [veterans from World War II] can buy a home in the bracket of $10,000 to $15,000. Let me give you an example that you can appreciate. Our steel workers as you know, are now on strike. But any steel worker could buy this house. They earn $3 an hour. This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract running 25 to 30 years.

Khrushchev: We have steel workers and peasants who can afford to spend $14,000 for a house. Your American houses are built to last only 20 years so builders could sell new houses at the end. We build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren.

Nixon: American houses last for more than 20 years, but, even so, after twenty years, many Americans want a new house or a new kitchen. Their kitchen is obsolete by that time. . . . The American system is designed to take advantage of new inventions and new techniques.
 
The discussion between Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev was marked by Khrushchev’s particularly dense communist rhetoric and Nixon’s polite and diplomatic rebuttals. In one of Richard Nixon’s finest hours, according to historian Robert Dallek, “At the height of the Cold War competition with Soviet communism, a contest millions of Americans feared might end in disaster, Nixon gave the country fresh hope that it would come out on top.”
 
—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

 

Richard Milhous Nixon / Boris Chaliapin / Tempera on board, 1959 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine.

Cited:
Robert Dallek, Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
 

Portrait of an Artist: Erik Hougen

This is the third in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Photo by Nick Gordon

Q: What is your name, where are you from, and where do you live now?

A: Erik Hougen. I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, and have lived in Brooklyn, New York, since 2006.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with? 

A: I work primarily with watercolor, but I also make prints.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: My watercolors begin as digital photographs or video stills. I separate the image into four color channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, the same way a digital printer works when it outputs a print.

I then paint each layer using very transparent washes of watercolor. My paintings are like manual digital prints, using the same separations a printer would use but physically rendering them by hand.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.), and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I have a BFA from Minnesota State University, Moorhead, and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Currently I work as a master printer at Lower East Side Printshop and as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute. At Lower East Side Printshop I have a chance to work as a collaborative printer with many intelligent, talented artists. Getting to know them and seeing their creative process is always invigorating.

I also teach printmaking classes at Pratt Institute, which is a different environment from the printshop. I get a positive, exciting energy from being around students, and feel camaraderie with the other faculty. Most faculty are part-time, working as professional artists while not teaching. They are all pretty busy, doing other amazing things besides teaching, so having time to catch up at Pratt helps feed my creative drive.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: Christine Walia, who is the programs director at Lower East Side Printshop encouraged me to apply to the competition. She has a gift for finding opportunities for artists, and really has her finger on the pulse of the art world.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

              Photo by Nick Gordon

A: I was back home in North Dakota a few years ago, which is when I took the photo of my father I used to create the painting.

I had started painting these big portraits, and had always wanted to use my father as a subject. It was Christmas Day, and we had just finished eating lunch. The light was bright but soft while we were eating, and I kept looking at him and thinking it would be great for a painting.

After we ate I took a few pictures of him and my uncle that I used for paintings. Usually it takes a few minutes for the subject to feel comfortable enough to get the right photo, but I think I took two photos of my dad. 

Q: Can you tell us about your larger body of work?

A: In the past year or two, I have been making large watercolors and silkscreens inspired by a vivid dream I had. In the dream I had to bury my own dead body. I looked at the dream not as scary, gory, or horrific, but as more of an awakening or a rebirth. I have had some big events in my life recently, and maybe my mind had to bury my old body, or self, to transition into the next part of my life.

At first I was trying to re-create these events in film, but this idea is more about my real life, not fictional events. The paintings portray events from my life, and drawing inspiration from classic cinema, the dreamlike scenes are composed of smoke and fog, washed-out light, or heavy darkness.

I also have been painting some landscapes, which is new for me. I was trying to emotionally charge the landscapes based on their relationships with the characters and scenes in other paintings.

Q: What are you currently working on?

 A: Recently I have been excited about making prints again, mostly etchings, silkscreens, and lithographs. My watercolor painting technique evolved from printmaking, which was how I used to work almost exclusively before I started painting. Printmaking shows me why and how I paint, and I always carry printmaking thought or technique back to my paintings.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.

A: I was on a trip to New York with my parents when I was younger, and we went to see some art. There was a video where the artist was passing a raw onion back and forth between her mouth and her parents mouth’s without using their hands. Because the onion was raw they were all crying a lot, and if I remember right the video was played in reverse. My mom thought it was pretty strange, and I remember her telling me, “see, Erik, anyone can be an artist these days.” She was so right; somehow, that comment gave me hope.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: Jennie C. Jones. She is the most famous artist I know, and she is really nice to me.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Rauschenberg, Johns, and the other artists working in lower Manhattan in the 1950s. New York seemed such a different world back then. I would take some cash back in time with me and buy a few of buildings in SoHo while I was there.

Q: What/who inspires you?

A: Other artists, and my wife. Seeing my friends and contemporaries do great things gives me a mutual feeling of happiness for them, and drive for myself. More importantly, my wife is supportive, yet tough on me. Her encouragement is crucial to everything I do.

Photo by Nick Gordon

150 Years Ago Today, January 1, 1863

Emancipation Proclamation

By the President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

"That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."

Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN

WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

 

Image: Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Le Mere (Mathew Brady Studio, active 1844-1894).  Photograph (1863) from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

 

Portrait of an Artist: Lucy Fradkin

This is the second in a series of interviews with artists participating in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opens on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. It will feature the works of forty-eight artists in many forms of media.

Woman Ironing, 2012 / Acrylic gouache, collage and pencil on paper, 44 1/8 x 30 in.

Q: What is your name, where are you from, and where do you live now?

A: My name is Lucy Fradkin. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I was raised in Port Washington, on Manhasset Bay on the north shore of Long Island. I spent many formative years in southern Vermont. The year I lived in Italy also had a profound influence on my work and life.

I currently live on Staten Island, which is a remarkable place to be: fresh air, birds, and a ferry ride from some of the world’s most important cultural institutions.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I paint on paper with gouache or oil. I frequently incorporate collage, colored pencil, and pencil into the work. I occasionally add buttons, thread, and wire onto and into the surfaces.

Q: Can you tell us about your technique/creative process and about your larger body of work?

A: With sources ranging from the ancient frescoes and mosaics of Etruria, Rome, and Byzantium to Indian and Persian miniatures, from vernacular, hand-painted signage to folk art, my paintings capture timeless moments through a contemporary lens.

For the past fourteen years I have focused on creating portraits of a broad range of individuals. Consciously rooting my works in the rich traditions of portraiture and genre painting, I place figures, often women, in domestic settings. My figures are reticent and static, endowing my scenes with a mysterious and solemn aura. Though my work is clearly inspired by traditional art forms, I maintain its relevance through the quiet presentation of issues of gender and race, informed by personal history.

I use color and pattern in my paintings to evoke emotion, to tell stories of daily life, and to draw the viewer into an intimate world. In many of my works, I incorporate collaged decorative elements sourced from old catalogs, field guides, and vintage books. By meticulously cutting and pasting significant motifs and images, I develop intricate designs, rendering my surfaces more distinctive and my works as a whole more visually complex.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I am a self-taught artist who has dedicated my life work to developing a personal voice and a skilled craft.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I was one of the artists selected for the original competition in 2006 and received an e-mail from the National Portrait Gallery.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: This is a portrait of my husband, the Jamaican-born sculptor Arthur Simms. We had been looking for a live/work space to buy for many years when I painted this in 2011. One month later Arthur found us our wonderful home.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: Last year I was fortunate to receive an award from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation for a space program studio where I was able to work on large-scale work. I am currently working on a series of small-scale works in a studio in my home while trying to find an affordable larger studio.

Q: How has your work changed over time? Can you tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist?

A: I worked extensively from the model for many years beginning as a high school student and continuing when I lived in Vermont and participated in a lively community of artists. In 1991 I spent several months traveling in Mexico and Guatemala. The indigenous art and hand-painted signage inspired new directions in my own art-making.

In 1992 I was awarded a four-month artist residency at Altos de Chavon, an affiliate of Parsons School of Design in La Romana, Dominican Republic. From there I was able to travel to Haiti, which was a life-changing experience for me as an artist. Despite its status as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti has an extraordinary and vibrant culture of visual art.

In 1994 I traveled to Greece and Italy and saw firsthand the ancient frescoes, mosaics, and medieval works that had inspired me for many years. I felt such affinity with this work that I started traveling to Europe regularly to live amidst this inspiration. In 2002 I spent a year living, working, exhibiting, and lecturing in Italy. Based in Rome, I was able to travel extensively around the country further informing my work through a visual immersion into these ancient worlds.

Q: What inspires you?

A: Travel to other cultures continues to be my biggest inspiration.

 
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 2009, 2009 / Acrylic gouache and pencil on paper, 50 x 38 ½ in.

The Battle for Fredericksburg, Part II

It was not so much about the number of men as it was about the lay of the land.  Had the battle of Fredericksburg been about the numbers, the Union army would have easily won the day.  Geography, however, provided the advantage for the Confederate army.  On December 13, 1862, Robert E. Lee’s army would be outnumbered by at least thirty thousand men, though rebel fortifications atop Marye’s Heights and adjacent hillsides south of the town would give them a keen strategic advantage.

More soldiers were at Fredericksburg than any other battle of the Civil War.  About 200,000 men—slightly less than today’s population of Richmond, Virginia—fought in this battle, and the Confederate victory stopped Ambrose Burnside’s march to Richmond.   Abraham Lincoln, seeking a success before the onset of winter, was disappointed in the sorry conclusion to a difficult year.  Both sides would use the months until spring to regroup forces and plan for the next campaign.

As with so many battles in this war, Fredericksburg saw the contributions of many skilled officers and courageous soldiers.  One of the stories to emerge from the battle was that of Confederate major John Pelham (right) who would survive this battle, only to fall a few month’s later at Kelly’s Ford.  Civil War historian Herman Hattaway writes of Pelham, “He was a favorite of General Lee’s who had nicknamed him the Gallant.  Now… with two artillery pieces, Pelham held the Union thrust in check for a critical thirty minutes.” 

Pelham’s immediate commanding officer, JEB Stuart, ordered the young man to retreat with his artillery, but Pelham held his ground until one cannon was disabled by Union fire and the other ran out of ammunition.  General Lee commented at this moment, seeing Pelham’s stand against two dozen large federal artillery pieces, “It is glorious to see such courage in one so young.”

The Union general who met with the most success that day was George Meade (right), whose division managed to partially penetrate Stonewall Jackson’s command within the Confederate line until, as Hattaway again notes, “Inadequately supported… they could not hold the ground they took, which was regained by a counterattack under the leadership of Brigadier Generals Jubal Early and A. P. Hill.”  Beyond Meade’s thin moment, the northern forces were left with nothing to celebrate at the battle’s conclusion.

The Battle of Fredericksburg is also responsible for bringing the voice of Walt Whitman (below) into the war.  Arriving from New York after the battle, Whitman searched for his brother, George, who was wounded during the conflict.  It was then that Whitman chose to stay in the area, settling into Washington and volunteering his time at the military hospitals of the city, among them the hospital in the Patent Office building, now the home to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum.  His work brought him face to face with the soldiers who were wounded and dying from both sides of the fight. 

Whitman, it is thought, visited with more than 100,000 men in his volunteer time, and these visits and these men’s experiences are the subject matter for much of his Civil War journals and poetry.  The war evoked much passion from Whitman and his time in Washington provided him with another subject for his work; Whitman was fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and his most well known works of poetry would serve to commemorate the sixteenth president.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Robert E. Lee / Edward Caledon Bruce / Oil on canvas, 1864-1865 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

John Pelham / Mathew B. Brady / Half-plate ambrotype, 1858 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

George Gordon Meade / Unidentified artist / Albumen silver print. c. 1863 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Walt Whitman (31 May 1819 - 26 Mar 1892) / Samuel Hollyer (1826 - 1919), Copy after:  Gabriel Harrison, (1818 - 1902) /Stipple engraving on paper,  1854-1855 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

 

Cited:
Hattaway, Herman.  Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War.  Columbia (Missouri): University Press, 1997.