When Timothy Fichtner had his portrait made by a leading Seattle
artist, he did it up. He threw a private party, invited everybody who was
anybody, played “You’re So Vain” on repeat, and, when a buzz had
settled across the room, finally unveiled the painting.
“I mean, we need to go back to that,” artist Joe Park says
when he recalls the evening, referring to the courtly tradition of
dramatic unveilings of portraits, followed sometimes by gasps of shock
(Goya’s portrait of his ugly queen comes to mind).
That was 2001, and the Fichtner painting was Park’s first taste of
commissioned portraiture. Being paid to make a likeness couldn’t be
more different from Park’s signature work. He is known for paintings
that derive entirely from his imagination, and are, themselves,
imaginary environments. His 2005 survey at the Frye Art Museum,
Moon Beam Caress, was full of anthropomorphic animals in
colorful settings influenced by anime and cinema—a hardened
factory-working bunny on a smoke break, a domestic bear doing the
ironing in the basement.
Which is why it was surprising to see hard-edged, sepia-toned
portraits of real, recognizable people (Austrian artist Erwin Wurm and
San Francisco dealer Rena Bransten) by Joe Park on the walls of Howard
House last year. Even more surprising, there was a note with the
portraits, advertising the artist’s services for anyone interested in
commissioning him.
It seemed about as likely as a note saying Park will design
tattoos.
That’s an exaggeration, but only slight. Few artists do formal
portraiture-for-hire these days. It’s an antiquated practice, something
most artists—and sitters—consider the bailiwick of the
Sears studio or some fusty boardroom. Park isn’t particularly public
about his portrait practice. He sees it as somewhat separate from his
“regular” paintings. Since 2006, when he began working on portraits in
earnest, he has made about 40 of them. None of those—even the
ones that weren’t commissioned but were instead made for Park’s own
reasons (he estimates about a half dozen are commissions)—will
appear in Park’s solo show of new works at Rena Bransten Gallery in San
Francisco this September.
What are his reasons for this semiprivate sideline?
Commissions bring money, but Park says he would continue making
portraits, and taking commissions for them, even if it weren’t for the
money. He started making portraits when he was trying to experiment
with new painting techniques—smoky swirls and shadowy cubistic
shapes—and finding that his old imaginative process was failing
him. He needed real objects to measure his experimental images against,
and “I thought the ultimate thing was individuals,” he says. That’s
when he hung his public shingle at Howard House: open for business.
When he chose subjects, he deliberately picked people he knew, and
who were generally recognizable in the art world, so that the paintings
could be at once intimate and public: curators Michael Darling, Chiyo
Ishikawa, and Eric Fredericksen; artists Gretchen Bennett and Alfred
Harris; dealer Kirsten Anderson. Seattle Art Museum commissioned a
portrait of its departing board president, Susan Brotman, and the
museum acquired it for its permanent collection.
Park found himself hooked on portraiture as more than a practice
device. He was drawn to the challenge of finding a way to maintain his
own vision without losing the very real, live subject. He had been
wondering about this conundrum ever since he noticed the stiffness in
one of David Hockney’s very few commissioned portraits, a majestically
chilly 1971 picture of Sir David Webster, head of the Royal Opera
House. Was the sitter a stifling personality, or was it being a brush
for hire that froze up the picture?
“That’s one of the things I wanted to know,” Park says in an
interview in his studio. “I like the idea of acting—the idea that
you walk out onstage and rehearse what you’re going to do when nobody’s
there, but then, being able to do the exact same casual walk and act
when everyone’s watching. I’m not sure I’m totally there.”
Portraiture has been stretched beyond the point of recognition in
the last century, and plenty of portraits bear no resemblance to their
ostensible subjects. But there’s an emotional charge between artist and
subject when the artist intends to be at least somewhat faithful to the
subject. Hockney, for instance, ups the ante by setting up a mirror for
his subjects so that they can see what he’s painting. (This has,
reportedly, led to some funny arguments between Hockney and his
father.)
Park calls that extra electricity in the air “a little accompaniment
of worry when you raise your brush.” While he says it would be “bad for
the paintings” to capitulate to somebody else’s idea about how they
should be portrayed, he nevertheless walks the line by inviting outside
forces into his studio. Where he used to have total control over his
(inanimate) source materials, now he has to contend with them. When
Park ran into the German painter Tim Eitel recently, Eitel said to
Park, “I saw the portrait.” That’s all he said. Park has no idea what
this means.
Another subject, Judy Wagonfeld, whose husband commissioned her
portrait, delayed picking up her visage for weeks because she was
worried that she wouldn’t like it. “That’s how crazy portraiture is,”
Park says. (Wagonfeld did like it, in fact, and had this praise for
Park for doing portraits at all: “He’s really putting himself on the
line.”)
The effects of studying the discipline of portraiture are already
appearing in Park’s still-lifes. Mounted on the easel at his home
studio now is an unfinished scene, based on a photograph Park took,
picturing a bouquet of pink roses in a grocery-store case that are lit
from the left by a neon tube. The painting is full of the same cubistic
geometry and wild shading that he was practicing in his portraits, and
it includes a reflection of Park’s body as he photographs the glass
case.
Unlike in his past works, these paintings have an aliveness that can
only come from observation, and a tension fueled by Park’s new dialogue
with things he can’t control. He intends, he says, to expand the
portrait practice, from the current head shots to full-body works, and
from photographed subjects to live sittings. “It looks like my whole
career’s done in reverse,” he says, “where I’m working toward observation.” 
