The Great Painted Portrait Artists
For legacy or vanity, portraits still hold great appeal. Departures looks at five artists who are bringing the tradition into the 21st century.
At least once every decade, it seems, the art world stokes the old debates about whether painting is dead, whether figurative painting is hopelessly retrograde or suddenly sexy. But the painted portrait—a mainstay since Renaissance times—never goes out of fashion, thanks to that irrepressible human desire to be immortalized in a work of art. Even after photography came along and changed everything with its democratizing accessibility, the painted portrait remained something special: the intimate exchange between artist and subject, the meticulous rendering of the sitter onto canvas, the uniqueness of the finished object. After all, unlike photographs, no two paintings are exactly alike.
These days commissioned portraiture is generally seen as a commercial art world niche, and dedicated portrait painters tend to work outside the contemporary gallery system. Sometimes represented by brokers or dealers of more academic realist art, they often rely on word of mouth and their own social networks to find clients. These five New York painters, in various stages of their careers, are some of the most respected practitioners in this specialized field—sought after for their unique ability to capture something essential and unmistakable about their subjects.
Bradley Livingstone Black
As a premed student on a golf scholarship at Duke, Bradley Livingstone Black took a course on the anatomy of the lower extremities. “We got to dissect a cadaver,” the Canadian-born artist, now 32, recalls. “Nobody else wanted to touch it, but I was dazzled. I could see the light hitting the tendons like rainbows.”
Though he abandoned his medical aspirations early on, Black remained enamored with the wonders of the human form. “I love the body—men, women. I can see why architects talk about ‘the figure.’” He took a painting class his senior year and went on to get an MFA in sculpture at the classically oriented New York Academy of Art. It was during his graduate studies that he began doing portrait commissions.
These days Black—who plays golf less often (“It’s a very visual game and, when you get to a certain level, really creative,” he says)—works out of a studio in a glass-walled building on the Lower East Side. His recent portraits include a monumental equestrian painting of the Infanta Elena of Spain, the king’s eldest daughter, a commission that arose from a discussion she and Black had at a dinner party about her unsatisfactory experiences with artists. Black depicted the princess in a simple gray riding jacket atop her horse (the artist, as it happens, is also a rider), with a royal residence in the background. The finished painting now hangs in her home in Madrid, alongside Black’s portraits of her two children, Felipe and Victoria.
By his own admission something of an overgrown kid himself, Black says he especially enjoys painting children. Last year he did a pair of sunny portraits of two young brothers from a prominent Cuban-American family that show the boys, all blond hair and dressed in double-breasted topcoats, posed against plain backgrounds. One is “kind of shy but smiling,” the artist notes, while “the other guy is more pensive, sort of like me when I was a kid.”
An admirer of the Old Masters (he likes to quote Ingres: “If you can draw, you can paint”), Black references contemporary art as well. The sibling portraits, which are painted on separate canvases so the boys can each have his own one day, are intended to hang flush together, “with this strong red Barnett Newman stripe along the side, unifying them,” he says.
Though Black usually paints from photographs, he feels it’s essential to spend time with a subject. “You have to have an interest in psychology,” he says. “A lot of people don’t like to sit anymore, but I’m not wired that way. I like everyone’s unique history.”
Black’s drawings (charcoal, graphite, chalk, pastel) start at $10,000 and his oil paintings at $25,000. Contact him at brad@livingstoneblack.com or go to livingstoneblack.com.
