Omar Lopez, my former colleague from Norman’s Restaurant, first contacted me about doing a commission portrait for him in 2016. I think his having seen my portrait of our mutual coworker Brian Jakoby and his wife Allison may have been the catalyst. Omar had initially mentioned a portrait of his mother and sister. This was at a time that I was becoming very preoccupied with exhibitions and logistics. I was also very much bogged down in the very lengthy process of Mourning Mörlenbach. I asked for a bit more direction from him but found that communication on this particular project stopped. I was so busy that I never followed up.

 

The following year Omar contacted me again about doing something for his wife’s birthday. At that precise moment I had been back at restaurant work for over six months, and, with the exception of Memphis, the cat portrait commission for Debbie Hanley, my drawing had all but stopped. I realized that I would put far too much work into it and that whatever I would be paid would be slight; nevertheless, the idea of a deadline appealed to me. After all, I had always defined success as an artist as merely the expectation or pressure from others to produce more work.

 

Omar was more prepared this time. He let me choose between two photos to work from. This one was from a classic selfie they took of themselves reclining on the beach. In the original shot they are leaning almost 45 degrees to the left. The light is intensely bright and its direction from the right created some rather fleshy shadows. The contrasts in Jessica’s hair were also aggressive.  All these details made it a more interesting portrait than something like my self portrait earlier that year. Too much mid value without contrast is dull. Yes, I managed to create some painterliness in the way I hacked up my self portrait with streaking; but this is not really the kind of thing that interests me. 

 

What does interest me anyway? I began to ask myself this more and more as I worked on this piece for Omar.  There is no media angle here.  There is no diverted attention. The visual syntax is utterly straightforward. Yes, I was simply making a picture that looked like the people in it. I had become rather disgusted with myself for what I had come to see as a creeping sentimentality in my work.  What had happened to the grand discipline of the master plan? Had I finally managed to burp and fart out the bloat of my self importance? No, not really. I just didn’t care anymore. I was going to do whatever grabbed my attention. If people I knew (like Omar) could regard it as meaningful too, so much the better.

 

The actual drawing is very dark. Omar is dark skinned and he is in the shade of Jessica’s face too. I had been in the process of committing to dark for the past year (The shirt in Jeff being perhaps the best example) so I ran with it. Omar’s squinty eyes worried me (he seems to squint even in low light in real life) but somehow I managed to capture something there. I liked the side by side dramatic and big noses quality to the picture. When one works as I do, cragginess and relief are more fun than porcelain smoothness.  Jessica’s hair was both the most fun to work on and the most disappointing.  Such, I suppose, is the nature of capturing the female pony tail. I like this effort better than Allison’s but not as much as Julianna’s in Blood Work. I do, however, very much like how Omar’s hair came out (again with the committing to darks). But perhaps my favorite result turned out to be Jessica’s teeth.