Jonathan Weinberg: 64 Portraits

Getty Research Institute
May - October 2003
 

	click above to see portraits

During my residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2002-3 I painted portraits of members of the Getty community. 32 of these portraits are now on view in the lobby of the Institute along with 32 portraits that I painted prior to my residency at the Getty.

I began doing 12" x 12" portraits in the summer of 2001 when I was living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Making portraits marked a major shift in my work from impasto oil paintings of urban architecture to flatly applied acrylic paintings of figures. In addition to portraiture I began to do paintings of male athletes and nudes (in honor of Southern California beach culture I continued this theme in a series of paintings of surfers).

One of the points of continuity between my early cityscapes and these portraits is an obsession with grids. I frequently framed images of the city through windows or scaffolding, giving them a gridlike structure. The grids reappear in the portraits when I arrange them in groups of nine. A more subtle point of continuity is seen im my work's continuing relationship to pop art. My cityscapes frequently focus on billboards. For example, from 1998 to 2000 I did an urban alphabet in which gay-inflected signs like "Queens," and "Male XXX" were highlighted. Such advertising signage was of great interest to artists like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. However, my heavily worked paint handling is the very opposite of Warhol's silkscreened method and Rosenquist's billboard technique, which were borrowed from methodes of mechanical reproduction. Likewise, the grid format and high-keyed color fo my portraits would be unthinkable without Warhol, and yet I have tried to infuse them with a sense of the handmade and the personal. Where pop portraits are often based on pre-existing photographs, I begin my pictures by asking the subject to sit for me for a few hours. Photographs are used n the process, but only after I have established some kind of intimate relationship with the sitter (many of my sitters are close friends). In essence I am trying to paint through pop to an earlier type of picture making in which painting is an attempt to preserve memories and feelings.

My portrait project nicely coincided with the 2002-2003 theme of the Getty Research Institute, since so many of the scholars-in-residence were working on portraiture in terms of the sitter's and the artist's biography. I have been struck by how few of my subjects have ever sat for a painted portrait before, even though so many of them are art historians. By having their portraits painted, the scholars got a taste of the collaborative nature of the portrait process, and how different it is from posing for a photograph. But more important for me, the portraits provide record of the extraordinary personal connections I made at the Getty and in California.

Home