My first thought was That sounds nice.
Eclipsed immediately by Oh god. What if no one bids on my portrait?
It was, shall we say, a pretty good reminder to get my ass in gear.
I counted back through my calendar, and I’d frittered away fourteen days since learning I was a finalist. True, I’d had a lot going on. But the North American Portrait Society wouldn’t be left waiting. The portrait submissions for finalists were due three days before the actual show, and even though other people had to crate and ship theirs, and I could just Uber mine over to the gallery, I still had just over three weeks left to get this done.
Three weeks.
Not nearly enough time for my old, fully functioning fusiform face gyrus—not to mention that I hadn’t even started painting. Or even really thought about it.
Time to pull it together. If I was well enough to marry Peanut’s veterinarian, I was well enough to paint one portrait.
But … how?
The portraits I did were classic, traditional ones. One of my art teachers in college had called me “a multicultural twenty-first-century Norman Rockwell.” I took all different kinds of subjects and gave them a Saturday Evening Post treatment—realistic, simple, easy-to-understand images with lots of warm rosy light and plenty of charm. Those were the style of portraits my mother had painted, too—and, in fact, I’d taught myself to paint by copying her portfolio. That’s what I did in high school instead of drinking: stayed in the art studio twenty hours a day and copied my mother’s brushstrokes.
I’d say, at this point, you could barely tell my work apart from hers, and that not only made me feel proud—it made me feel like I’d found a way to hold on to her.
But here’s the truth about portraits like these: They are all about the face.
Everything in a portrait like that is directing the viewer toward the face—the lines, the angles, the framing, the colors. The face is where the emotions are, and where the story lies, and where the heart of the whole thing happens.
You can’t fudge it, is what I mean. You can’t put the subject in sunglasses. Or have that person facing away from you or hanging upside down or hiding under a hat. Not if you wanted to be good. Not if you wanted to win ten thousand dollars. You needed a perfectly rendered, so-detailed-it-feels-alive face—front and center.
I’d done it a thousand times. I’d crushed it a thousand times.
Faces were my specialty.
But now?
I had no idea what to do.
And I had only three weeks left to figure it out.
* * *
AT SOME POINT, in the wake of what Sue called my “facepocalypse,” she had kindly agreed to be my live model. I had a better shot with her face, she reasoned, since I knew it so well.
And plus, as ever, she’d be willing to do crazy stuff.
I called her after getting the reminder email, and I said, “We’re still on for tomorrow, right?”
“Of course,” Sue said.
“Don’t flake out, okay? I really need you.”
“I never flake out,” Sue said.
She sometimes flaked out, to be honest. But who didn’t?
Sue worked as an art teacher at a primary school, and the plan was for her to come over after work every day for a week. We’d split some kind of takeout dinner, and her boyfriend Witt swore he didn’t mind her “working late.”
“You’re not really working, though,” I said. “Are you?”
“Labor of love,” she said, letting us both be right.
I made Sue bring her red polka-dot dress with the ruffle sleeves. If the face was going to be weaker than usual in this portrait, then everything else had to be stronger. I’d need to render the silkiness of those ruffles in a way that made you feel them rustling against your own skin. Also, the red needed to be just right—rich and eye-catching without being overwhelming. I’d have Sue sit on the floor and frame the perspective from up above so I could fill as much of it as possible with that gorgeous fabric.
No question: that polka-dot dress had a lot of work to do.
Sue, I should mention, has a stunningly beautiful face. She has perfectly defined lips, an elegant nose, black hair so shiny she could sell shampoo, and monolid eyes with deep brown irises. I’d painted her twenty times, at least, and she was one of my favorite subjects.
In ordinary times, we’d already have this thing locked up.
But now, of course, things were different. Maybe I knew her face so well, I didn’t have to see it to paint it? Maybe I’d painted her so many other times, my hands would know what to do by muscle memory?