110509 Notes For Portrait Gallery Talk, Summaries of Celebrity

Download 110509 Notes For Portrait Gallery Talk and more Summaries Celebrity in PDF only on Docsity! 110517  NPG  Bill  and  Melinda  Gates  Unveiling  –  Artist’s  Remarks                                                                                                                                              1 Artist’s Talk Delivered at the Unveiling of the Bill and Melinda Gates Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery on May 17, 2011 When I first received this commission from the National Portrait Gallery in the spring of 2009, I began negotiations with the staff at the Gates’ Foundation to see what kind of access I would have to Bill and Melinda. Limitations of time and access are a fact of life when it comes to contemporary public portrait commissions. In the past, artists would expect their subjects to sit for days, weeks, and even months. Few, if any of my subjects, are able or willing to make that kind of commitment. I usually count myself lucky if I can spend a couple of days in their company – one day to get acquainted and one day to photograph– supplemented by phone conversations and correspondence. Trying to find fruitful ways to work with such limited contact has influenced the procedures that I use in composing my work. I still rely on many of the techniques and craft skills that portrait painters have been using since the Renaissance, but without the assistance of the digital camera, the computer, and visual processing software, this portrait, and most of my other portraits, would not have been possible. NATIONAL  PORTRAIT  GALLERY,  BILL  &  MELINDA  GATES  PORTRAIT  COMMISSION   5/17/11 The limitations imposed by the Gates Foundation were even more severe than usual. After a good deal of back and forth, it was concluded that I could spend no more than one hour with Bill and Melinda early in September of 2009. The photo shoot was scheduled to take place at Bill’s new company in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle. Named Bg3C, for Bill Gates catalyst. The company is intended to be a think tank where Bill can work with scientists and engineers on projects that engage his curiosity. In the fall of 2009 it had a minimal staff housed in a lavishly appointed suite of offices overlooking Lake Washington. On the day before the photo shoot, I was permitted to unpack my lighting equipment in Bill’s office. I observed with trepidation that it was a maze of furniture, coffee tables, floor lamps, artwork and mementoes. Staging the photo shoot was not going to be easy. In the meantime, I spent a couple of hours photographing the premises, recording details of the interior architecture and décor; the illuminated, translucent, partition wall of the conference room, the large, flat-screen monitors displaying digitalized versions of impressionist masterpieces, and the expansive views of the lake and landscape from the office windows. I was collecting raw material. The backgrounds of my portraits are inventions; they don’t exist in reality. Elements might be lifted from the actual location of the photo shoot, but these elements are then shuffled, rescaled, and combined with imagery imported from other places both real and virtual. The 110517  NPG  Bill  and  Melinda  Gates  Unveiling  –  Artist’s  Remarks                                                                                                                                              5 of 60 minutes, Bill’s chief of staff announced that it was time for the next event on their agenda and we were abruptly finished. Even before flying out to Seattle I had been thinking about different ways that I might approach the portrait, and different historical models from which I might draw inspiration. I knew that there were certain tacks that I was not likely to take. For example, it would be presumptuous, based on so brief a contact, to attempt a psychological portrait, to depict what the 18th century English portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds described as the “peculiar coloring of the mind”. There were other things that I didn’t want to do; I didn’t want to make a conventional corporate portrait, a glamorous society portrait, or a celebrity portrait. (Although there is no doubt that Bill himself occupies the status of a celebrity in the public imagination. Every visitor, workman, or contractor who happened to come by my studio would invariably exclaim “hey, Bill Gates”, when they caught sight of the portrait in progress). What did I think that the portrait could and should do? After the photo shoot, while I was in the process of editing my images on the computer, I decided that there were three stories that the portrait could convey, if not explicitly and completely, then at least by implication. NATIONAL  PORTRAIT  GALLERY,  BILL  &  MELINDA  GATES  PORTRAIT  COMMISSION   5/17/11 There were first, the public biographies of Bill and Melinda -- who are they, where do they come from, what are their backgrounds? – the meat and potatoes of portraiture. Some part of this could be implied by the simple rendition of visual facts: How old are they? What do they look like? What kind of clothing have they chosen to wear? What do their body language, their gestures, their expressions tell us about them? I would try to record these facts with a visual clarity unencumbered by expressionist or rhetorical flourishes, in a style that would be modeled after John Singleton Copley’s portraits from the turbulent 1760’s – those wealthy and public-spirited Boston merchants and their capable and independent wives that he painted with such candor and lack of bombast. The second story was the saga of Microsoft, the start-up tale of technological innovation and entrepreneurial success that produced the tremendous wealth that funds the foundation. I decided to signify this story through a contemporary, hi-tech setting, loosely modeled on the interior of the bg3C offices. I also wanted to suggest the importance of the computer revolution by using the image of a large, flat-screen monitor as the centerpiece in my narrative scheme for the portrait. The third story was the ongoing story of the foundation itself – a philanthropic undertaking unprecedented in its size, scope and global ambitions and the related story of the marital partnership that was guiding its development. For the foundation itself, I would lift images from the foundation’s website that referenced important aspects of its 110517  NPG  Bill  and  Melinda  Gates  Unveiling  –  Artist’s  Remarks                                                                                                                                              7 work and methodologies, and compose these images as a display on the flat-screen monitor. Bill and Melinda’s partnership, their mutual dedication, their co-equal authority, and their contrasting, but complementary personalities, would be literally embodied in their poses and expressions. Let me step out of sequence to say a little more about the pose that I eventually constructed. Simply having Bill and Melinda stand together, or showing them seated side-by-side on a sofa would not suffice. I needed to find, or to create, a pose that would link them together, and at the same time dramatically differentiate them one from the other. In the end, Bill’s pose with arms folded, is more self-contained than Melinda’s, which is more relaxed with her right arm extended toward the observer. Melinda, by most accounts more empathetic and people oriented than Bill, is shown with her head backgrounded by the human kaleidoscope of the foundation’s projects. Bill, usually described as the more cerebral partner, is shown with his head backgrounded by the clouds. Although their head and torsos are set apart and distinct, Bill and Melinda both look us squarely in the eye and their legs line up symmetrically suggesting a unity of purpose. I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t replicate a traditional pattern where Bill would appear as patriarch and Melinda as helpmate. NATIONAL  PORTRAIT  GALLERY,  BILL  &  MELINDA  GATES  PORTRAIT  COMMISSION   5/17/11 thought that these small images would make a striking visual contrast to the large, fore grounded figures of Bill and Melinda, and by rendering these small images in a “pixilated“ or pointillist, manner I would add to and enrich the painterly variations of the portrait. I began with a collection of images, randomly arranged on a black field like icons on your computer’s desktop. But this was not interesting to look at. The small images needed to be more organized, and needed some kind of background pattern to provide coherence. Many of the images that I started with depicted Bill and Melinda visiting clinics, surrounded by school children, or interacting with researchers. It was too much. The effect was hagiographic. I eliminated all of those images and began adding images of maps and graphs that documented the foundation’s efforts to develop new metrics for evaluating and improving the impact of its spending. I organized my growing collection of images into two, distinct sets: maps and graphs in one set, project images of people and things in the other. To deepen the fictive space, I rotated each of the project images into three-dimensional perspective. I thought, perhaps I should add some text to the display. I introduced the phrase: “all lives have equal value” which is one of the recurring themes of the foundation, and placed it in the middle of the screen between my two sets of images, but the opaque lettering leapt out of the composition like a strident slogan. I thought, “It doesn’t need to shout, I can make 110517  NPG  Bill  and  Melinda  Gates  Unveiling  –  Artist’s  Remarks                                                                                                                                               11 it whisper”. I altered the transparency of the text until it settled quietly into the surface. Then I thought, “those are just words, can I find some way to embody and reinforce that sentiment visually?” I combed through the foundation’s website and came across a photograph of a graduation ceremony at a girl’s school in Africa. Two girls in the crowd caught my attention, their luminous faces full of promise. I cropped the picture and enlarged the detail, so that it filled the entire background of the monitor. Then I blurred the focus of the faces to make the icons pop in the foreground and finally, I angled the entire image – icons, text, and background – to match the perspective of the partition wall behind Bill and Melinda. I felt that I had now succeeded in investing the monitor with the qualities that I had been searching for, but in so doing, the monitor had become an exceedingly complicated visual artifact that was going to be very tedious and time-consuming to paint from scratch. Rather than do that, I decided to scale up the image in the computer, print it out on archival paper, collage it onto my canvas, and using it like the cartoon for a fresco, paint on top of it to create the intense color and pixilation that I wanted. Adding the heads of the two girls to the images on the monitor felt like a turning point for the entire composition. The virtual space of the monitor heightened my awareness of the confined architectural space of the office interior and the expansive panoramic space of the landscape outside. The larger-than-life heads of the two girls now shared the focus of the composition with the heads of Bill and NATIONAL  PORTRAIT  GALLERY,  BILL  &  MELINDA  GATES  PORTRAIT  COMMISSION   5/17/11 Melinda. What had formerly been a duet was now a quartet with four pairs of eyes rhythmically enlivening the surface. The girls turn their expectant glances to the future, Bill and Melinda turn and face us, challenging us to become engaged. The process that I’ve been describing, from the photo shoot in Seattle to the finished composition, took five months to complete. These compositional preliminaries provided me with a solid road map for the portrait. But happily pixels are no substitute for paint. Putting paint to canvas is always an unpredictable adventure, full of surprising detours and discoveries and unexpected cul-de-sacs and frustrations. But if I’ve done my job well, the transitory litter of digital documents and photographic fragments involved in the creation of this portrait will have been swept away, superseded by a painting with a formal coherence and a narrative clarity that I hope will engage visitors to the museum in the years to come.