Portraits: 1968 - 2021 - Becky Hendrick: The Art

Portraits: A Retrospective
Welcome
Truth and Fiction
   A Lifesaver
The Gifts
The Process
Decisions
Finding Baxter

Self-Portraits
3, 2, 1
   Excerpts
   A Diversion
   Metaphoric Selves
   E-Z Cindy Sherman

WELCOME!

After a lifetime of painting, I must have a hundred portraits and self-portraits to my credit. It’s odd, because --- except for a few larger paintings like the one shown above ---I never really considered them to be art, capital A: Art. Not having the content of my more serious and ambitious works, the portraits required a different intention and approach, demanding a kind of calm and an intensity of looking. Painting a portrait always seemed to be a useful exercise, like a serious musician’s practicing the scales. Making portraits requires quicker decisions and automatic eye-to-hand responses. These paintings were less self-consciously made than my more conceptual work, and the process has always nourished me. I lose myself in the process, and that is a good thing. No one would ever consider me to be a "portrait painter," but now that my Art Life is diminishing (by choice), I realize that over the years the portraits make up quite a body of work, a "show." So...

Welcome! This is a show of portraits, a retrospective spanning more than forty years. The painting shown above (and when it was in progress, below), stretches ten feet over two canvases. It was done in the 1980s from an old photograph of my daughter with her two cousins. In a fraction of a second the camera had captured a fleeting moment of perfect joy, and I wanted to make it last, to make it permanent. The painting had a title but, rolled up and stored in a long-distant garage, that has to remain unknown for now. This painting became part of an installation about scale and permanence and all sorts of important themes that was shown in a couple of museum exhibitions. It, like a few others, was ambitious in both scale and content.

* * *

I’ve always done pictures of people and, since college, also made many self-portraits, but I’ve only shown a few of them publicly and, as a separate genre, only once, in a 3-person show "Local Color" at the Adair Margo Gallery in 1997. (HORRORS: I am the only surviving member of this trio!)

* * *

Daughter Jennifer was in high school when I asked her to sit for me in 1985. This may have been the last time --- and a rare one, at that --- that she and I sat looking eye to eye for many, many minutes. As with several of the larger and more serious paintings, the initial image was painted from life with photographs helping me complete it. Since my teenager was experimenting with and shaping her personality and persona, and I happened to have an odd rubber mask on hand, I decided to emphasize the idea of her personality's evolution and titled the piece "Masks." I can see it from my bed.

 Masks, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 60"

And then, a year later when she was a college freshman in New York City, from a photograph, 30" x 26". This painting "lives" with us in Mexico and continues to surprise me with how darned good (I think) it is!

* * *

Truth and Fiction (1986)

Back in the 1980s, while reading the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, I was struck by the convincing descriptions of her invented characters, and I thought about the similarities to making believable portraits. I copied several of the true-sounding details and arbitrarily paired them with my more-or-less truthful paintings of family. There were five paintings in the original series; three remain in my "collection." Each is 36" x 30", acrylic and oil on canvas. (These are pretty good paintings, but the excerpts from KAP's fiction, being so incorrect about the people pictured make them hard to acknowledge. Maybe I should change the verbal descriptions? Fuggedaboudit.)

* * *

A Lifesaver

For six months after 9/11, I lay on the couch in a fetal position with my back to the television news. Of course I kept teaching, but the kind of serious painting and other Art I'd done was out of the question; my work was all about paying attention, and that was the last thing I wanted to do in 2001. But I needed to do something in the studio, and the new and first grandbaby became my subject. Working from a 4" x 6" photograph, I slowly and deliberately made an enlargement and a simplification of that precious grandson's image. Over and over I played music --- Gorecki's Miserere, k.d. lang singing Jane Siberry's lovely Calling All Angels --- and studied the innocent and happy little boy who was just a few months old when our world changed forever.

Baxter, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30"

* * *

The Gifts (1968-2018)

Until recently I always preferred to start the paintings from life, although I occasionally worked then and now (mostly) from photographs that I (mostly) took/take myself. In 1997, to celebrate our 50th birthdays, I travelled to Manhattan, Dallas, and other cities to have secret sittings with the children of college friends and to complete these surprises from my own photos. That is what started the gift-making and gift-giving pieces. Lately, farther away from friends and family, there has been another change: the paintings are done for me, alone, and for the “process,” a word overused these days, even by me, that is described in detail later in this survey. There is no pressure. I must meet no expectations. I am free to “lose” the subject and find it again, lost and found, over and over, until I finally stop.

Not too long ago I intentionally withdrew from the ambitions of the "art life," satisfying myself instead with smaller projects that leave less evidence and require less public effort. Still, making portraits attracts me and gives me a reason to clean the brushes, to palpate the aging tubes of pigment, and to look, look, look. The most recent portraits are surprises, gifts for family members and for friends whose families have a youngster.

New habits contradict all my previous studio practices: the 20" x 16" canvases are cheap, "store-bought," and shallow rather than being the strong, 2" deep, hand-stretched ones in which I took such pride. Now my palette may be a scrap of aluminum foil or a piece of cardboard, and my easel is a flat table near the kitchen, in view of the television. There is only ambient light so sometimes I'm literally painting in the dark. Since no one knows --- or cares --- that I am making these paintings, I am unburdened by anything except the decision-making process, the final shred of an "art life" that I can't quite yet abandon.

(To examine the paintings below, click on one and view each separately. The images are in approximate chronological order, with the most recent ones first, going back over the years and decades. Most are in the 20" range, with a few larger works on paper from the 1980s.)

Post Script, 2018

And then I had cataract surgery. It is a miraculous procedure, for sure, and my vision --- I have been considered to be "legally blind" without my complicated lenses for the past 55 years --- was suddenly almost perfect. New glasses with both far and near lenses changed "almost" to "perfect." Except ... I can no longer practice what I call "deep looking," a process I developed and described way back in the 20th century, a way of examining photographs holding them a few inches from my uncorrected eyes.

And horrors: reading, a major part of my happy life, is neither as satisfying as it had become, as over the years I'd begun to read without my glasses, holding the book close to my eyes. The sad truth is that I no longer have the close-vision ability that allowed me to make so many portraits from photographs!

So, after much effort and frustration and fruitless efforts, I changed my methods, my intentions, my approach to these gifts: they are now combinations of photographs with added lines of drawn color, often less detailed and descriptive, occasionally with added fabric or paper or objects: "fun," I hope, in a new way. The following portraits show the changes --- with most recent ones first ---, and there is a child or two nagging at me (unknown to them or their parents) to paint them NEXT, NEXT! Soon I intend to use only the basics: red, blue, yellow, black, white and gray. Stay tuned.

THE PROCESS: trial, error, and --- finally --- stop.

Copying a photograph --- enlarging and transferring flat lines, shapes, and colors --- is about as easy a thing anyone, not just a painter, can do, if you practice looking/seeing long enough. You could project, of course, or use a grid: simple. I do not work this way! Instead, I now paint from a photograph of a child I might have never met, from a photo NOT taken by me, from a photo often printed from social media. And it can be hard. But this new method is also very freeing. Half-way through the process, I quit looking at the photograph, referring to it on occasion for a measurement or a detail, but then it's back to the canvas, hoping at some point I'll know it's an "okay painting." Often it is not: aging eyes, arthritic fingers, and the lack of a defined strategy and intention have taken their toll. No one knows what I am doing, no one cares, so the results don't matter, and I am free. When I discover a hint of personality --- though, again, what do I really know? --- or when I feel that the source of a gesture or expression has been revealed, it feels worthwhile, a "gotcha!" moment. And maybe someday I'll meet these children I've gotten to know, at least superficially, through the eye of a camera.

For me, the most important thing is for it, at some point, to be a good little painting. "Good enough," as my mother says.
I have some favorites. (Almost all of these paintings are on canvases in the 20" range.)

La Princesa (2018; post eye surgery)

"Girl with a Blue Rubber Band" Erin (2016)

Leah (2016)

Lizzie (2016)
(Oh, how I wish I'd written vertically up the left side in French: "This is not a baby-doll"!)

"Holy Frijole"/John (2016)

Amy (2015)

Oliver (2015)

* * *

DECISIONS
(sometimes they are conscious ones)

Dana is the younger daughter of a college friend, and I sat with her, fiddled with the lighting, sketched directly on the canvas, then completed the painting from a series of photographs I took. Her school mascot was apparently a devil and its logo was The Flames. This brilliant and devilish little girl reminded me of a wonderful description Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo as he described a portrait he was working on, and, completing my small painting using Vincent's effects, I copied this final passage on the back of the canvas with emphasis on the idea I borrowed:

“I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as
     the nightingale sings, because it is in his nature. He’ll be a blond man. I want to put my appreciation,
the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.
But the picture is not yet finished. To finish it, I am now going to be the arbitrary colourist. I exaggerate
     the fairness of the hair, I even get to orange tones, chromes and pale citron-yellow. Behind the head,
     instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the
   richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head
     against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an
  azure sky.”

Finding Baxter

The story of this image is part of the process' charm; I not only get to study Baxter "up-close-and-personal," but I get to smile to the point of laughing just thinking about how his honest and private expression occurred, and we all know that a smile is life's best medicine. I need it.

The kids and grandchildren were visiting our place in Mexico one summer. Between their swims in the Sea of Cortez and their scuba lessons and their trips to look at whale bones, we poked around the town's back roads in a borrowed golf cart, visiting a primitive bakery and looking at the oddities of poor (next door to rich) Mexican life. Photo-ops were abundant. We stopped for lunch at a small cafe across the street, in a catty-cornered way, from a bordello someone had told me about. I'd wandered across from it a year or so before, trying to get a photograph of the fat gray-haired madam on the upper porch; I'll have to look for that image, even though it wasn't very successful, taken with nervous haste. It wasn't until this lunch that I realized that many of the house's workers were transvestites; as we sat by the window that became pretty obvious. With Baxter sitting across from me, a game emerged: looking out the window as someone passed by, I'd say: girl or boy? man or woman? We didn't get into the particulars of the sexual aspects, of course; it was just about guys coming by in high heels and tight shorts and skirts. Somebody had to mention it: Gran, of course! A figure would pass the window, teetering on his/her heels, wearing a tight spangly costume even though it was high noon, hair upswept. Girl or boy, I'd ask Bax. Um... GIRL, he'd say. We'd wait and watch and, if we were lucky, the person would turn around and show us a heavily painted face but --- putting it mildly --- not a pretty one, instead a square-jawed masculine scowl, and the answer was obvious: BOY! MAN! Baxter, 12 years old and precious as can-be gave me the most perfect and irrepressible smile that translated into "I don't believe this, this is so crazy, we are having F-U-N": joy. And, my lucky day, the camera was up and focused.

I've been trying to "find Baxter" from a precious 6" x 4" photo for nearly a year, but he is escaping me. Yes, of course I could grid the image or even project it, but that would spoil the point. I want a reason to look at this boy's beautiful face, I want to search for the magical source of his animation. It's not really about the end result, it's about engaging with my fine young grandson, even if it's long-distance and a one-way meditation. The finished product --- if and when it occurs --- will be only 14" x 11." Maybe I'll keep working on this little face forever. Maybe I'll just enlarge and frame the original photograph.

(P.S. Photo enlarged and framed.)

AND THEN...

SELF PORTRAITS

1987

HOW TO PAINT A SELF-PORTRAIT IN TWO SIMPLE STEPS

1. Look in a mirror.
2. Paint what you see.

Simple, I said. I didn’t say it is easy.

But let’s say that you can paint, that you are at ease with a brush, you know the basics of color mixing, and, for the most part, you don’t have to think much about the process. (That word again!)

Now comes the hard part. Depending on your age and self-esteem, you have to get comfortable with your reflected image. You’ll go through the required observations of imperfections, asymmetry, and imbalance, you’ll overcome the need to make facial expressions (smiling to defy gravity, etc.) and settle into the deep looking process. Your features will relax, your skin will sag, and your eyes may squint with the necessity of visual attention. Your face will eventually become as significant as a still life, which of course it really is: you, alive but still.

Self With Grace Descending, 1997

But, says my mother, It doesn’t look like you. Well, Mama, of course it doesn’t, at least it doesn’t look the way you see me. But it’s how I see myself, flipped in reflection, with my right eye looking into my right eye. And, Mama, when you see me, I'm usually smiling!

For anyone who thinks a self-portrait is motivated by ego, I say it’s just the opposite: a serious study of one’s reflection requires you to be objective about the one thing you can’t separate yourself from, your self, your image. A quote from J. Krishnamurti explains this with my emphasis: “Beauty is where “you” are not. The essence of beauty is the absence of the self. The essence of meditation is to enquire into the abnegation of the self.” Let me add that the essence of a self-portrait is to inquire into the same abnegation, and, as I've already said and repeated, you lose yourself in the process.

Three, Two, One (1976)

Sometimes the work you do reveals things you are not even aware of. For an extensive series of small portraits painted in San Miguel Allende in 1976 or 1977, I played around with a distortion mirror. These compositions were made without any anticipation of the nearing divorce and, as these three little paintings illustrate, the reality of a family's break-up or break-down. Only in retrospect do they tell a story.

Excerpts

Some larger paintings included self-portraits. The vertical painting, which was a meditation on "God" no longer exists but the smaller excerpted self-portrait does. The square spiraled painting is missing, whereabouts unknown, but dedicated, when/if found to the Women's Studies Department at UTEP. Among many symbols and images centered around the physics of change, the installation "Vision/Revision" had a painted plaster bas-relief self-portrait.

* * *

A Diversion

In 1997, on my 50th birthday, I tried to paint a self-portrait but couldn’t get past the mirror. Time had done its job, and accepting the reflected image at rest, without animation or expression, was impossible for me. My literal self-portraits were over. For the next year or so, rather than look into a mirror, I used mirrors as a medium, and this detour resulted in some of my favorite little pieces, almost all given away. Here is just a sampling.

* * *

Metaphoric Selves
l. to r.: L'ideé (mannequin, sequins, jello mold, glass doorknob), Hot Flash (wax, string, firecracker from Honduras), Both Ends (copper pipe, wax, wicks)