Portraits: Styles Aren’t Sitting Still

To exhibit what he describes as his eccentric personality, businessman Sam Storm posed for his dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte.

Free-lance writer Laura Maslon commissioned hers because she was depressed about turning 40.

And proud of having survived heart surgery, a Beverly Hills woman asked to be depicted bare-chested--scars and all.

Clearly, the face of portraiture is changing. While stiff, somber, pretentious oil paintings of wealthy dowagers were once the portrait artist’s stock in trade, today successful couples are leading the pack of Southern Californians commissioning bright, casual and sometimes quirky tributes to themselves and their families.

“I used to get lovely, wealthy ladies who wanted pictures of themselves before they lost their looks,” confirms Mar Vista artist Joan Weber, who has seen her business double in recent years. “Now I’m getting people that drive Volvo station wagons.”

Typical of Weber’s work is the 5x3-foot mixed-media photo collage that hangs in tax attorney Nancy Iredale’s office at the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker in downtown Los Angeles. Eight photographs show Iredale’s home, her husband skiing and playing the piano (not at the same time), Iredale swinging a golf club, her parents with the children, and her eldest son bottle-feeding his younger brother.

“At first it was distracting,” Iredale says, “and there are books that say professional women shouldn’t have pictures of their family in the workplace. But I love the sense that I carry them with me into the office.”

Weber, whose mixed-media creations are generally “too psychological,” “too difficult” and “too bleak” for most collectors, began doing portraits to help make a living and has completed 60 in the last eight years. Many of her clients are part of the “ ‘thirtysomething’ crowd,” she adds, “who want to commemorate the happy years of their lives when the kids are little and haven’t turned to selling crack on the streets.”

Though often more traditional in nature, portrait painting on the East Coast also appears to be enjoying a surge in popularity. Artist Fred Mason of Greenwich, Conn., says he, too, is painting a growing number of “younger people . . . your basic arbitrageur, investment banker and broker . . . people in their early 30s and 40s who have young children and lots of money.”

Regardless of coasts, such immortality doesn’t come cheap. Prices can range from $1,000 for a pencil drawing to $30,000 for an oil painting by one of several noted artists. Cost also varies according to size, number of persons depicted, medium and complexity.

But even high price tags aren’t discouraging “the burgeoning number of people who have after-tax dollars to spend on things other than mortgage payments and school tuition,” says educator Mumsey Nemiroff, 54, who teaches art connoisseurship privately and through UCLA Extension. “Art has become trendy,” she adds. “And (portraiture) is one of the things people do when they get money.”

Roots in the Renaissance

With roots in the Renaissance, modern portraiture withered in the early 1900s when abstraction came into vogue. Patrons were not keen on expressionistic depictions of their wives with blue noses or green hair, explained Josine Ianco-Starrels, senior curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

But the emergence of Pop art in the ‘60s and Photo-Realism in the mid-’70s nurtured a revival, and Los Angeles’ flourishing art scene has provided both willing artists and sophisticated consumers.

In addition to their intrinsic value, portraits are considered good investments by many art collectors, Nemiroff points out. “If you have your portrait done by an important artist--like D. J. Hall, Sylvia Shap or Don Bachardy--then there is a secondary market. You can sell it or give it to a museum.”

Nor are customers troubled by the idea they are flaunting their wealth or exhibiting a sense of narcissism, artists report. For the most part, subjects seem bolder than ever.

“When I began doing portraits in 1964 people were a little shy about it; they felt it was a display of ego. But that kind of embarrassment doesn’t exist any longer,” says Sacramento artist Gerald Silva, 52, who has done portraits of pop music’s Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones and film producer Irwin Winkler.

Clients ‘Loosening Up’

Noted muralist Kent Twitchell, 46, agrees. “(Clients are) loosening up. Even a year ago it was scary, almost a pretentious thing for people to have their portrait done. Now they do it very naturally, they’re happy about it.”

But more than egotism, subjects may be well served by a daring spirit. “If vanity is your motive,” Nemiroff says, “putting yourself into the hands of a contemporary artist, you’re bound to be appalled.”

Joe Fay’s two portraits of the Barbakow family of Brentwood, for example, are fanciful if not flattering. In one, Jeff Barbakow, 45, chairman and chief executive officer of MGM/UA Communications Co., is depicted with purple ears, while his wife, Margo, 41, has orange lips, violet eyelashes and bursts of green and purple in her hair. A second work shows son Bennett, now 7, with lightning-like green zigzags on his cheeks, and a bright orange ear.

“Everyone agrees it’s a terrific portrait of Bennett,” Margo says. In fact, the Barbakows liked it so much they commissioned one of the entire family. “Bennett’s is for us and the one of the family is for Bennett to have after we’re gone,” she explains.

For his part, Fay says portraits have been “real good moneymakers.” He did 35 in 1987, up from 5 in 1982, and expects to complete 50 or 60 this year, many of them commissioned as birthday or Christmas gifts.

Some who order portraits say vanity is clearly their motivation. Others, like Sam Storm, maintain their objective is fun.

Before sitting for his portrait on April Fool’s Day, Storm and his wife, Paulette, went shopping. After trying on numerous get-ups at a large costume store, Paulette Storm says they finally emerged with the perfect outfit.

Blocks in His Castle

Now in the living room of their Beverly Hills home hangs Sylvia Shap’s larger-than-life portrait of Sam Storm. Captured in Napoleonic garb and grandeur, he wears a look of self-satisfaction, as though he’s just conquered Austria.

“(The portrait) is one of the blocks that fits into my little castle here,” says Storm, 44, president of Beverly Hills-based Selective Security Inc., which provides security systems for homes and businesses. He also has equipped his home with secret passageways, a recording of dogs barking at the entrance and murals in the back yard.

Shap, 41, routinely surveys her clients’ wardrobes and likes to eat with them as a means of becoming better acquainted. She, too, finds demand for her portraits has doubled in the past few years.

Sometimes, she adds, the specter of divorce hovers over the process, especially if an artist’s work is likely to rise in value. Rather than be depicted with his wife, Shap recalls, one man asked for separate portraits “because you just never know.” Two paintings later, she adds, they are still happily married.

Muralist Kent Twitchell learned that lesson the hard way. He had already sketched out a 7-foot portrait of a husband and wife with their two sons when the couple decided to divorce. The artist then had to re-create his vision minus the husband.

Many modern portraitists work from photographs, which means subjects miss the “patrician” experience of remaining still for hours.

But other artists, like 54-year-old Don Bachardy of Santa Monica, insist on painting from life. “It’s more fun, and it’s harder,” explains Bachardy, a portraitist for 30 years. “You’re dealing with somebody maybe you can’t control. A photograph doesn’t change. People change every minute.”

On the other hand, Bachardy is not keen on talking to his subjects and does so only if they can’t endure the silence. “Painting is 90% concentration,” he says, “so I often find myself saying the most peculiar things.”

Getting to Know Them

Other artists delight in getting to know their subjects. Kathryn Jacobi, 42, and her clients talk and listen to music during sittings that take from 12 to 40 hours. “It’s very intense and very much of a give and take,” Jacobi of Santa Monica says. “Usually we become close.”

Married to actor Richard Dysart, Jacobi recently painted Allison Tucker, the 19-year-old daughter of Dysart’s “L.A. Law” co-stars, Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry.

As usual, Jacobi worked on two paintings, moving back and forth between them. At first, she saw someone young and naive, “just another kid.” It was her second portrait, however, that showed Jacobi’s final impression, a “much more formidable young woman, a sensitive, emerging adult.”

A friendship developed as a result of the interaction between Venice artist D. J. Hall, 37, and writer Laura Maslon. Before beginning her work, Hall went through Maslon’s entire wardrobe. “It was her way of finding the essence of me,” says Maslon, 43. Once Maslon was properly attired for the portrait, Hall shot several rolls of film. Then subject and artist together selected the slides that would become models for the painting.

“It was the first time I’d seen the creative artistic process from beginning to end,” Maslon observes. “And through the back and forth of seeing various stages of drawing, we discovered we had very different backgrounds. But we also had a lot in common emotionally.”

Sometimes, however, artist and client just don’t see eye to eye, and that’s when working from photos can be a real plus. Says Mar Vista artist Joan Weber, who was once sued by a disgruntled client: “Not meeting the subjects is the part I like best.”