Chapter 6: Studio portraits

What we have most of in Mom’s studio work is portraits. The dancer pictures are a special kind of portrait, of course. She did numerous other ones, showing forth the individuality of the sitter and her or his momentary feelings as well. They could also be construed as in a sense self-portraits, showing diffferent aspects of Mom herself. My favorites are her pastels, for both the daring and the subtlety of their colors (7a-d). Their color combinations are audacious and not at all what a photograph would capture. They capture something else, the inner being somehow converted into splashes of color:











The portraits so far are of women. What about the men? Instead of vivid representations of feeling, we get strong, solid compositions. Again, none corresponds to the photographic image: She has abstracted the form of the masculine as she sees it in front of her (7e-f):






In these pastels, the colors are bold and reflect a kind of inner security in the figures, of a sort I expect Mom looked for in a man. If we look at her ink drawings of the same time, we sometimes see the same (7g). But there is always the exception to the rule (7h), a face with the same sadness or dissatisfaction that occurs so often on the faces of her women:






Something Mom tried a couple of times was pastel portraits on black paper (7i-j). I suspect she used photographs to paint from rather than live models, because it was a technique she hadn’t used before. The results are quite striking, especially the second of these, but these are the only ones she did.






Sometimes it is hard to tell when she is using pencil and when pastels, as for example these two (7k and 7l), done in a kind of brown that could be colored pencil. There are no color splashes at all, yet the freshness of the boy and the inner poise of the young woman jump off the paper at us:






In this chapter so far I have been presenting her sketches in pairs. Here are two that are different from the others so far and also from each other. The first (7m) uses hardly any background color for its effect, relying on the natural colors of the subject and her clothing. In the second (7n), the backing is the TV section of a newspaper. I suspect it is not drawn from life but is her image of what a news reporter should look like.






Besides portraits on paper, Mom did some in oil, perhaps 20 or 30. I will show my favorites (8a-i). I don’t know too much about the circumstances around them. The first one (8a) is of Louise Howard, wife of Mom's son John. The second (8b) looks like her version of something French, but I can’t place what. It is on a rather large coanvas, 24 by 36 or so. The one of a young man shows a different conception of the masculine than the others so far. He is dynamic, spirited, probably a good dance partner. She did several of that sort. I think she was aiming at a type, not just particular individuals, because one of them has the words "Apollo, leader of the muses" and "Adonis" written on the back. The last in my series (8i) says “Sonia of T. Lawrence” on the back.