The subjects of these portraits are famous American men who died in 2009 or 2010, at about the age my father would have been now (he died in 2000).  The idea for the series came to me in January 2010, during the week that both Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger died.    Their deaths came on the heels of the passing of several iconic male figures in American society (Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, et al).   I realized that I was watching the end of an era in American letters and politics, and also the demise of certain icons who had been sort of authority figures for me (or anti-authority, in the case of Zinn).

I like painting portraits of people I know, and even though they were famous, these men felt familiar, in terms of their sometimes looming presence in my life.  Like archetypes, or mythical figures, they were distant, and yet clearly part of the story of my growing up on the East Coast.  As different as they were politically and otherwise, these six men were part of the cultural elite of their time, physical embodiments of a certain intellectual and civic tradition of discourse which I associate strongly with New England and New York, and by association, with my father.

Words were important in my family, sometimes more important than deeds.   My father would make references to Shakespeare, Twain, and Tennessee Williams in a casual conversation about the stock market, and we were expected to keep up.  Like my father, the men in this series were extremely good with language, often devastatingly so, and understood the power of a turn of phrase.  I may not have agreed with Buckley’s or Safire’s politics most the time, but I could not deny their eloquence and (especially in Buckley’s case), wit.  Some of these men occasionally used words to bully others - a trait my father shared.  But unlike my father, all of these men achieved fame in the world by capitalizing on their language skills.   My father, sadly, remained in the shadows for most of his life, crippled by a mental illness which limited his expressive output to writing scathing, ranting letters to increasingly estranged family members.

In executing the series, I chose to limit myself to two colors, yellow ochre and ultramarine blue, and one size (12” x 12”).  I started with a quick pencil sketch for each one, drawing from a photograph turned upside down (to get my right brain engaged), and then painted quickly, avoiding too much paint build-up on the surface.   My goal was to keep each portrait as fresh and loose as possible, while managing to capture a resemblance to the subject.  Having a fairly strict set of rules - of decisions already made - helped me to focus more easily on the painting itself.  I also used a museum box canvas, which floats the image away from the wall, and creates a neat cube effect from a distance.  Originally I was going to paint more portraits in the series, but I ended up liking the way the blank canvases looked between the portraits as they hung on the wall, so I left them there.

©2010 C. WAMPOLE. May not be reproduced in total or in part without express written permission.