How I Work

For many years I painted only from life. People came to my studio and posed for me. It was hard work to keep them entertained while capturing their likenesses. I wanted to paint "correctly", so I didn't use photographs. Then one day at the Metropolitan Museum in New York I was admiring a large, beautiful painting by Manet of a woman on a bench in a park, with an iron fence by her. To the lower left of this most gorgeous painting was the photograph from which it had been exacty rendered. If Manet can do it, so can I, I thought.

Now I always work from photographs. The benefit of this, other than the fact that I no longer have to amuse my models, is that I can paint smiles and other lively moments of expression. (Have you ever wondered why George Washington looks sleepy while crossing the turbulent Delaware?) This is especially precious in the painting of children.

I work in oils.

Most of the pictures of the past several years are the small format faces, many of which are featured here. They are 14 x 14 inches, extreme close-ups of the face. The finished face is three or four times life size. Often a client will commission several of these, and the result is a group of modular pictures that can be rearranged or distributed with ease.

I also paint large, full-body, and group portraits. With actual interiors or preferred landscapes as background. Paintings like these take months, even, occasionally, years. Ed, the taxi driving Shakespearean actor, is a seven-foot painting that took over a year and several incarnations to finish.

More than 300 of my portraits hang in collections worldwide.