At a wedding, this is years and years ago, SR introduced himself to me. He said he was a friend of the groom, that he had heard I was an artist and that he was looking for an artist to paint a vision he’d had. I said he was in luck because I had just come off of years studying visionary art — how as a tradition it had evolved over time. I’d struggled to understand the relation between real visions, historically specific interpretations and the individual creativity of artists. SR told me his story. He was a Jewish guy who had always loved and honored his traditions. In recent years he had been travelling on business to Asia. He’d fallen in love with the cultures of China and Japan. This love was challenging everything, opening everything up to question. At the time I met him he was learning to speak Mandarin in Manhattan’s Chinatown. One day he was waiting to cross the street after class when, amid slow traffic, a bus of Hasidim slowly rolled passed. As the bus went by he realized that the Hasidim would not recognize their kinship to him as immediately as he had recognized his kinship to them. This, he said, was his vision. He didn’t go out of his way to elaborate. He simply described it as a moment of focus. At that instant, all of the elements of his current in-between identity had been visually present in his physical environment. He spoke of it with an unself-conscious enthusiasm convincing me not only that something had indeed occurred to him but that he had found within himself the kind of psychic grace necessary to balance such an experience with our default notions of the nature of reality in the modern world.
After hearing his story I really wanted to work with him. He sent me photos of the area in Chinatown where the vision had occurred. Unsatisfied, I eventually visited the corner myself. My friend Ivan drove me around the block several times as I took still more photos. I remember being really struck by the difference between what I’d been able to get from SR’s photos and what I got being on site. “It’s so 3D!” I said. I remember Ivan replied, “That’s because it is 3D,” and then said something about how maybe I might want to set up an easel across the street and “paint from life.” “Not for the money I’m asking,” I said.
SR visited me a few times and posed for me. This is actually quite a good likeness of SR, somewhere between 1995 and 1999. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done to accurately portray someone’s appearance. SR
himself pointed out quite readily that his face and features were curiously asymmetrical. Indeed they were, nothing seemed to go off in the right direction. This asymmetry, combined with the odd angle of the pose, made catching his image intensely difficult. The more I drew from what I knew of faces, the less it looked like him. The more I caught his likeness the less believable the image was. I struggled and struggled to get the lines and angles just right. And then suddenly, there he was.
I had imagined that a person looking to commemorate such an experience would be very careful about choosing the artist who would take charge of such a task so I was aggressive in pursuing the commission. I sent him a portfolio of my work on a series of twelve post cards over twelve consecutive days. The post cards opened up and inside were essays detailing my studies of religious visions through the ages. Some of these essays were over ten pages long. When the twelve days were accomplished he gave me the impression that it all had been unnecessary, that he had been satisfied with me at our first meeting. We worked together for a few months, as I said he came to visit me and pose. I sent him sketches such as the ones pictured above. We could never settle the issue of my compensation and so the project was left uncompleted.
