Alex, your portraits are identifiable in some ways. They’re usually people we might know. Does that change the way you approach the portrait, if you know or don’t know the person? ak: Not at all. If someone’s interested in the light on the figure, it’s going to be different than someone who’s interested in giving you a real, three-dimensional account of the person. Some people want to tell you what they know about the person. Other people just want to show what he looks like. I’ve always felt that Titian’s portraits and Rembrandt’s portraits tell you too much about the person. I like Tintoretto’s portraits best because they don’t do that. They show you; they don’t tell you. It’s a very wide-open thing. I think the problem some people have with portraiture is what is it doing here in the twenty-first century? All art is subject to fashion. Fashion changes every three years. What’s happened in the last twenty years is that there’s been much more energy put into painting from photographs. These have a different look than paintings not made from photographs. I went to a modern art school ... wc: Alex, we’re both grads of Cooper Union ... ak: Yeah, but you didn’t have the same guy teaching you. My instructor was a hard-line modernist. He said, “In this class, we don’t use any chiaroscuro. We don’t use any modeling. We don’t use any aerial perspective. We don’t use any perspective at all. It is all line and plane, so reality and fashion exist in those terms.” That was a long time ago. bl: Alex, when you started to really paint portraits, there weren’t so many modernist painters that were interested in them. Maybe because portraiture was so out of fashion at that time? ak: It was completely out of fashion. Picasso and Matisse didn’t deal with specific information; they dealt with abstract terms. But for me the question was, “Is portraiture interesting or it isn’t?” Something
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