One Hundred Portraits
By Gary Michael

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

“The world of the eye and world of the mind seldom meet as cogently as they do in Gary’s work. This is especially so in the portraits, where thought and image seem to merge.”

M. Gordon Brown
Researcher for the Da Vinci Institute, a futurist think tank
Former Associate Dean of the Colorado University School of Architecture and Planning