Portrait

Viola and piano

In 2011, I was commissioned by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas to “respond” to one of the works in their permanent collection.  They led me on a tour of the entire museum and the work I ended up choosing was a piece of portraiture by American painter, Robert Henri (1865-1929), who was a patriarch of sorts to the Ashcan School of painters that worked to depict the lives of poor people (mainly in New York City) in the early part of the twentieth century.  The portrait I chose, one that Henri titled The Old Model (Old Spanish Woman), is of an older woman who has a sort of quiet dignity that’s evident in Henri’s brushwork (the work is pictured in the SoundCloud link on this page).

The thing about portraiture is that the person’s visage has to go through the filter of the painter in order to make it to the viewer.  The main theme starts in one key but, over the course of the work, is “lifted” gradually into another. Portrait is my way of trying to represent this using a pair of instruments whose colors I love to hear.