"My
friend the
artist!" a woman on the train called out. I'd met
her at the supermarket. Saturday. I'd been sketching quick gesture
drawings. "Ya do faces? Ya do faces?" I gave a shrug of assent. I
couldn't really deny I "did faces". "Do my face!" she demanded, her
Spike-the-Bulldog jowls quivering as she fussed with a beehive 'do
three times the size of her head.A real Hobson's choice, this. Should I offend by drawing a portrait or refusing to draw one? With trepidation, I picked up my pencil to start. The born caricaturist in me wrestling with the born pleaser. In a few minutes it was clear which had won.
"You made me look mean!" she snapped. "I don't look mean!" She turned to the woman next to her for corroboration. "Do I look mean?" Her friend shook her head "no".
"Do me again and make me look nice," she commanded, and I obeyed. Coward that I am, I went straight to the next page and gave her a facelift, subtracting an extra chin, pulling up the corners of her mouth into the facsimile of a smile. This Bride of Frankenstein, born in some Brighton Beach Beauty Parlor, had to be made, not beautiful -- she'd see through that in a minute -- but normal, plain, not grotesque. And yet there had to be a likeness, some likeness...
It was a difficult process, not one I'd care to repeat, to come up with a drawing she would accept that second time around. But I did it.
To make her victory complete, she demanded both drawings. What was more important, I wondered -- to have the "good" portrait or to keep the "bad" one out of circulation? As if by holding onto it nobody would ever know she looked like that. But she did, she looked exactly like that.
My brusque, burly sculpture teacher, admonished us never to be portrait painters. His father had been one and it was a thankless job. He remembered his dad painting a masterful portrait of a subject who just happened to be bald. Niceties of technique were lost on this guy. When the portrait was unveiled, the first thing he said was, "Where's the hair?"
