One Hundred Portraits

During his one-person show at the Saks Gallery in 1986, Gary painted a small portrait of gallery owner Lemmon Saks. Soon after that he did another of art critic Robert Hughes and looked forward to a future show in which he could exhibit these and one of his annual self-portraits side by side as “Art Seller,” “Art Writer,” and “Art Maker.”

But Gary didn’t stop there. He kept painting portraits of famous artists (painters, musicians, dancers, sculptors, architects) and writers. “It became a hobby,” says Gary. “Whenever I came across a black and white photo of an artist I admired, I painted him or her, guessing at the skin tones and eye color. That was the challenge and much of the fun.” Gary’s other criterion was that the person have an interesting face. “Why paint someone like Carl Jung, however much I admire him. He looks like a bank president.”

Gary calls the portraits a hobby because he has no illusions about their commercial value. “People may love Monet, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, and Tennessee Williams but aren’t eager to decorate their homes with these guys’ faces. I sell landscapes and still lifes but just keep accumulating portraits.” The accumulation reached one hundred with the completion of Peter Matthiessen in May of 2003. “He has a beautiful face, deeply lined with penetrating blue-gray eyes,” says Gary. “I got liberal with the paint and reckless with the color.”

In 2000, twenty of the portraits, including Robert Frost, Picasso, William Burroughs, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Eugene Ionescu, and Luigi Pirandello, found their way onto the walls of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of a show called "Real To Surreal". Only a few others have ever gone on public exhibition. The artist did realize a small sum on the series when an art professor who saw the museum show invited him to give a slide presentation to her class. Michael jokes, “They paid me $40, my sole profit on the portraits so far. That’s ok; I enjoy having a hobby, especially one that keeps me at the easel.”

Allen Ginsberg Ayn Rand Albert Schweitzer Anthony Burgess Arthur Miller Atget Auden B. Russell   Balthus Beardlsy Berlioz Bonnard Alfred Brendel C. Connolly Camus   Truman Capote Clarence Darrow   Dali Degas Dorothy Parker   Duchamp Edgar A. Poe Emerson Escher F. Kahlo Faulkner   Flaubert Francis Bacon Frank Lloyd Wright Franz Kafka G. B. Shaw G. K. Chesterton Gorky Harold Bloom   Homer   Ionesco Isaiah Berlin Jacob Epstein James Baldwin James Dickey Jasper Johns John Le Carre		John Updike (2) Karl Marx Kitaj Roy Lichtenstein M. Cunningham Mahler   Mark Twain Monet N. Fechin N. Mailer Nietzsche Nijinsky Orozco Oscar Wilde Paul McCartney Pete Seeger Picasso   Pirandello Raphael Soyer Richard Schmid Robert Frost Robert Hughes Rodin   Roman Polansky S. Rushdie Egon Schiele (2) Schoenberg Sherwood Anderson Sibelius Sigmund Freud Stephen Spender T. C. Boyle Tennessee Williams Tennyson Thomas Mann   Tolstoy Vonnegut W. B. Yeats   Whistler Walt Whitman Willa Cather Willem de Kooning Wm. Burroughs	Einstein, oil Ionescu, oil Nijinsky, oil Picasso, oil
Walt Whitman, oil		Samual Beckett, oil	Pirandello, oil
George Bernard Shaw, oil		Monet, oil	Georgia O'Keefe, oil
Mark Twain, oil		Tennessee Williams, oil	Egon Schiele, oil
Tolstoy, oil		Ludwig Wittgenstein, oil	Allen Ginsberg, oil
Pete Seeger, oil