The Portraits

A number of years ago, we in the art room created our first portraits using a grid of squares ala Chuck Close (contemporary NYC artist who creates huge portraits using a grid). Chuck creates all of the individual squares in his paintings himself. What makes our work distinct is that we had thirty-six different people contribute – each person creating one of the thirty-six squares in our portraits.

At that time, all of the portraits were of Marilynn, staff, and a few commissions.

The project you are viewing is all about members, and represents the first time that we used the grid technique to render portraits of them. Since this process requires a significant commitment of time, and collaboration of diverse energies, I think the sheer number of members is what held us back.

If we did one portrait, it seemed only right to create portraits of everyone.

How to decide which members to include?

I decided to do portraits all of our people who use wheelchairs. They are: Scott, Steven, Gigi and Kevin M.

(The only person in a chair we didn’t do a big portrait of is Hannah, because we created a life-sized collage of her in the figures phase.)

When other members asked me why we didn’t select them, I just told them “Because you are not in a wheelchair.”

They seemed to accept that just fine.