Nelson Shanks

Portrait artist Nelson Shanks revealed in an interview with Stephanie Farr his take on various subjects he's painted. This is my favorite part, when asked if he recalls his first painting as a child, Shanks responded early on his father went off to war leaving behind an oil painting kit. At age five he got hold of the kit and set up in the dining room, and that right there shows admirable maternal support because those paints smell really bad.

My aunt was working in Los Alamos. She sent a picture of an adobe house and it had the poles sticking out and the poles were casting shadows in a diagonal. So I sat down and I painted that. I remember being more intrigued, not about painting an adobe house, but in capturing the way those shadows worked.

When questioned, "Who did you find hardest to capture?" Shanks answered, Bill Clinton. Why? Because the reality is he is the most famous liar of all time.

Goodness. Worse than the Trojan horse? Worse than Piltdown Man? Worse than Watergate and worse than Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction? Surely there are other lies worse.

Shanks said that he never could get the the Monica thing completely out of his mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.

It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him. 

And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait Gallery. They're putting a lot of pressure on them.

He said made its way in to the painting subtly.

Philly.com 

The story is all over the place. I didn't even think of this, Shanks did. One item I read Shanks says that he actually set up a mannequin with a blue dress and a light behind it to cast a shadow on the fireplace when the president was not there. He always did like the effects made by shadows. 

Yahoo.com

Two Drug Addicts On The Subway After A Fix

Evan Izer. Two Drug Addicts On The Subway After A Fix, 2013
Ink, gouache paint & crayon on laid paper

Due to financial considerations, my "Sketchbook" website is down, so I thought I'd post some drawings here until I get things running again.

I used to love to draw pictures of people that I saw when riding the subway in New York City. My usual practice was to make the drawing in a small sketchbook as quickly and furtively as I could, using a mechanical pencil or sometimes an ink brush pen. I would later choose the best of these sketches and work them up in other media when I was back in my workshop.

I usually chose subjects based upon extremity of appearance— extreme beauty or extremity of another sort. The two people depicted in this drawing had the paralytic flush of people who just shot up. They remained like this— eyes rolling underneath closed eyelids, mouths gaping, slow-motion twitching— for the entirety of my 25-minute ride.