Telling the Truth (continued)

Q: So what’s over at City Hall?

A: What’s over there are 11 portraits out of this series that as soon as I finish Utah Phillips will be 69. My goal was 50, and I’m so into this that I couldn’t stop when I got to 50. The more people I paint, the more I hear about, the more I read, the more people I find that I want to honor this way. I’ve got a list of a hundred more names, and I’ll never do that, but I may do 20 more. There’s going to be a book published this spring for children; Dutton is publishing 50 of the portraits. I’ll see advance copies in a week or so, and the publish date is the first of June. The portraits at City Hall are there for Black History Month. [Subjects include Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X — ed.]

Q: About the traveling exhibit: Is that a standard group that you send everywhere?

A: No, people look at the portraits on the Web site and choose which ones they want. A lot of the portraits have biographies underneath them, and when the book comes out, we’re going to be publishing a curriculum.

Q: Who’s we?

A: Well, this thing has gotten a lot bigger than me. When I had painted the first, oh, about 17, and I was schlepping them around to libraries and schools, a man named Bob Sargent who’s a retired diplomat called me up and said, "Well, this ought to be a national traveling exhibit, and I can help you do that." So he has, for the last two years, been working with me nonstop. He’s devoted an unbelievable amount of his time to doing the logistics and finances of this whole show. He then put together a team of people to research and write biographies. And there’s a woman out in Louisville named Michelle Hemingway who runs a school, and she had bought some of the cards [a set of "Truth" greeting cards is available through the Web site and in some stores — ed.] to use in her history class. When I went out and talked, a lot of teachers would say, "Gee, this is great, but if we’re going to use this, we’d need a curriculum because we don’t have time to write the curriculum ourselves." So Michelle Hemingway writes and says that she’s teaching around these cards and working up a whole curriculum!

Q: Perfect.

A: I asked her if she’d be willing to write the curriculum around the whole project and then when the book comes out, we’ll publish it on the Internet. So that’s happening. There’s lots of synergistic things going on around this. We’ve had a lot of help. A lot of donations of money. My goal when I started this was to give all the portraits away to some institution which would hang them as a group. It felt absolutely wrong of me to capitalize on these people who had given so much of their lives to democracy in this country.

Q: How has it felt artistically, making this switch from what you’re known for — the Blake drawings, the illustrations, the editorial cartoons — to portraiture?

A: Strange. Even when I sort of declared to myself that I was going to do this project — I’d painted one portrait, of Walt Whitman, and I said to myself that I was going to do 50 of these and call them "Americans Who Tell the Truth" — I felt very unsure whether I really wanted to do that. Even after I’d painted five or six, and I could see it was going to take me in a completely different direction than where I’d thought I was going, I said to myself, "I can’t do this. This is not me." Now I totally accept it as me. I didn’t study art in school, I studied English, and for a long time one of my favorite writers was the Irish Sean O’Faolain. I remember in an introduction to one of his books, he said that an artist has to find the form that will contain all of his emotions. I couldn’t figure out in the way I’d normally paint or draw, that sort of surreal mode, how to get the emotions of my political outrage into that mode and still feel good about it. This was a way I could do that. I’m not doing this solely; I’m still doing paintings much like things I’ve done in the past, to let out other kinds of feelings. I always look for truth in ambiguity, not in making statements like this — but this is the center of me right now.

Q: After you quit working for Maine Times, did you get away from political art for a while? Is this a sort of homecoming in that sense?

A: Well, it was always there. There was always the suggestion of politics, but rarely that kind of direct comment on an issue. This is another way to get at the larger human dilemma.

Q: How many of these have you painted from life?

A: None of them from life. None of these people — even the live ones — have the time to sit for two weeks for me. What I do is I go and meet them and take my own pictures. I’ve painted at least 20 of them from people I’ve met. Sometimes I’ve worked in conjunction, in the sense of taking pictures and sending email images and getting comments.

Q: From your subjects?

A: Yeah, which has been very interesting. Some of them have forgotten about it; other people get very interested and involved. Frances Moore Lappe was like that. Marjorie Kelly, who edits a magazine called Business Ethics. That’s one of the really neat parts of this, is the relationships with the subjects. I develop a real relationship with each of them, even though most of them don’t know it.

Q: Anybody give you a hard time?

A: Well, not so much. I developed a wonderful friendship with William Sloane Coffin, who was one of my real heroes back in the ’60s. I went up to see him a couple of times in Vermont, and he complained to me that I made him look a little jowly. I actually drove up with the portrait, and he looked at it and decided it was okay. [laughs]

Q: You’re working on Utah Phillips right now. Who’s next?

A: I’m not really sure. I’ve got a bunch of them that I’d like to do. I may do Arthur Miller next. When I painted Coffin, he gave me Miller’s home phone and said, "Call him up." But I was busy doing other things, and didn’t do it, and then he died.

Q: And Hunter Thompson just now, too. Were you thinking about him?

A: There’s just too many people. I still haven’t painted either Philip or Daniel Berrigan. Barbara Ehrenreich I’d like to paint, maybe Bill McKibben, the environmentalist. Michael Moore I haven’t painted; I think he’s important. I keep hearing about so many interesting people. Edward Abbey, I think he’s a definite one. Kurt Vonnegut might be fun to paint. I haven’t painted Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, people like that.

Q: But you’re going to absolutely cap it off at a hundred?

A: At this point I can’t imagine either getting to that point or not stopping. [laughs]

Q: Will portraiture have changed you as an artist?

A: I don’t know. That’s one of the exciting things for me, as an artist. You never know what’s next. You never know what’s taking shape underneath, or for what reasons. I never could have imagined doing this. Where this is going in terms of my career, I have no idea. I paint to find out what’s going on inside me, so I don’t really know until it starts to take shape. I’m sure there will be a point at which something else will start to happen, and then I’ll be able to tell you the answer to that question.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com