Portrait of the Self-portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Nick Gurley & I are colleagues at work. He's an amazing artist and is as really prolific. We agreed it would be good to team up for a project together and so I asked him what ideas he had.

The basis for the picture is Nick. The final picture wass intended to be a sort of portrait of a self-portrait. Nick would occupy both chairs exuding "warmth, charisma and gregariousness" in one and "sullen remorse for so many life-choices" in the other.

What follows are the various shots that went into making the picture along with an explanation of the "making-of." The final image is the two works side-by-side in a gallery.

Building the Scene Round-1

I needed to capture Nick both chairs. We started by fixing the camera and lights in my (very cluttered) studio. Nick knew coming in the artist was going to be hating his life so he tried to convey that sense of unhappiness in this sequence. We took about four dozen shots with different compositions. This was the winner.

Building the Scene Round-2

The other picture would feature Nick as familiar with him... conversational, good natured and always willing to enjoy a beer.

Building the Scene Round-3

After combining the two shots I thought about the idea of making the picture recursive. A never ending pit of the tortured artists' miserable life full of regret... or something like that. Nick liked it too and that's where it went.

The Self Portrait Based on a Portrait

Because this is Nick's self-portrait he chose all the final expressions and body positions and the lighting using the previous image as a guide.

The off-setting cool and warm color pallets made for a fun time back in my studio.

Building the Scene Round-4

I cleaned up the studio a bit and we sat down once again. This time we took about two dozen shots in each chair based on the painting.

Here it is... the artist as a cold, frustrated man.

Building the Scene Round-5

For the happy subject Nick we needed more beer, for starters. We kept spent a lot of time trying to position everything on set using the easel as the anchor point in the room and Nick's painting our map.

I wanted the shadow to fall in-line with the back-left corner and along Nick's right shoulder as he's seated on the stool.

The finished Portrait

Again - here's the final piece. I printed a copy to match the same size (16" x 20") as Nick's painting.

Processing took six-eight hours over a couple days.

Precision of the Portrait Matching

I thought this comparison was pretty cool. We made real-life Nick match-up pretty well painting Nick.

Side-by-Side

Here photo and painting side-by-side in the Fermilab Art Gallery in 2018. I watched for a few minutes on opening night as people would saunter past each image. Two out of three people would notice the relationship and their reactions were fun to watch.