I sold a couple paintings of Ray Charles.  I sold a large 4′ X 4′ canvas and a 12″ X 12″ study.  The collector also commissioned me to paint three of his other favorite musicians.  The  problem was…This was never a painting of Ray Charles.

What you say?!

Sure, an African American man with dark glasses…It looks a bit like Ray.  I don’t paint celebrity portraits, so how did this happen?

It’s actually just a random dude coming up an escalator in the State of Illinois building

I take snapshots of random people in public.  I make paintings based on these people in the background, turning them into the main subject.  

I don’t focus on maintaining a person’s likeness, but use the face as the starting composition for the painting.  I generally start with as little information as possible and blow up the image into a painting.  

As a viewer of a piece of art, you look to fill in with your own meaning.  You want to figure out the painting, so of course it’s natural to assume this is portrait of a great musician. 

Why make a painting of a random guy?

It’s fun to just paint faces without worrying about if it looks like who it’s suppose to be.  A large painting can feel like an abstract painting.  The drips and “mistakes” are fine if they fit into the composition of the face I started with.

If a painting isn’t a representation of a specific person, I can be a painting about every person.  If the painting isn’t just about a man, it can be about mankind.  

The painting of “Ray” depicts a private moment of a man looking down.  We are observing him as he observes something.  The painting becomes about us as well at that moment because we are participating in the same human act.

Celebrity Portraits

I have painted portraits of famous people such as Mayor Daley, Michael Jordan, Brian Urlacher, Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Garcia, Mohamed Ali, Mick Jagger, and others that I can’t remember. These we almost all commissions or requests.  I guess I also painted Ray Charles…but I didn’t mean to.