I began drawing portraits as a young man, going to informal classes and taking a summer life and portrait drawing and painting session at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Following a twenty-five-year hiatus to raise a family and work at my career in publishing, I studied portrait drawing for several years with Andrew Lattimore and in more recent years with Athena Bing He. I am currently (Spring 2015) taking a portrait painting course with Wende Caporale at the Katonah Art Center. I have done “open studio” sessions at the Garrison Art Center and the Reilly League of Artists (White Plains).

I have had solo shows at the John C. Hart Library in Shrub Oak, the Hendrick Hudson Library in Montrose, and the Croton Free Library. For the past few years I’ve had single drawings in the annual Artists of Northern Westchester show at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Hudson Valley.

I like to think that my interest in portraiture intersects with my long-standing interest in existentialist philosophy, my admiration for Martin Buber’s I-Thou concept, and my more recent interest in consciousness and the mind-body problem. And from early childhood, I have wondered, as did Blaise Pascal, why I am here and not there, now and not then, me and not you. Neither science nor religion, it seems to me, can give us the answer.

An artwork is a dialogue between artist and subject. This is most clearly true in portraiture. I would like to think that my portraits are at once both objects and subjects. I hope that these men and women are interesting and unique objects to look at, but also that we see them looking out at the world--or at us--with eyes that are not our own. In some cases, I add some sort of background imagery; in other cases, I add some color, or simply some shading. And in other cases, nothing. But the eyes of the subject tell us that we are looking at a human being who joins us in living in this world.

Speaking of eyes, a brief word on that topic: Andrew Lattimore always reminds his students that “the eyes live in shadow.” And our great mentor, John Singer Sargent (1854-1925) showed, in his portrait drawings, that the artist can render the eyes in impressive detail or almost completely obscured in shadow, yet in either case those eyes see. They’re alive, and there’s a human being behind them.