A Portrait
We sit on high stools by the window eating a lunch of chicken and lentil soup, an Iranian dish spiced with jalapeño sauce. I’m in the studio of the painter Dans Nehdaran on 42nd Street and 11th Avenue. Clinton or Hell’s Kitchen though by now the terms are misnomers, luxury apartments having long ago replaced the tenements that inspired cop shows from the 60’s and West Side Story. On the 36th floor the view faces northward. To the left, piers jut into the Hudson. Below, there’s a scattering of parking decks, delivery trucks, and further uptown tall buildings pose behind arrangements of bottles and flowers. In particular we notice a new needle-thin skyscraper as we try to imagine how it stays stable in the wind.
After lunch, the sitting. The set-up is elaborate: a narrow mirror where I can watch the portrait emerge and a cellphone camera in time-lapse mode skewed to record the creation of the painting and my own micro-movements at the same time. I settle into the couch finding a comfortable pose and look at the portrait in the mirror. The start seems unpromising, a brownish blot in the center of the canvas. But eventually something happens, a gradual emergence, an image. Gray, white and dull brown brushstrokes become hair, mustache, beard. Black circles turn into eyeglasses. The initial blur is modeled, molded into flesh and shadow.
And I’m thinking of a Sunday night in 1970. After a concert. A public square in a small city circled by a steady current of traffic. A traffic light. A park bench, a girl. She’s beautiful: tall, thin, quiet, long brown hair. She’s wearing wire rim glasses, a green overcoat. Her name is Mary. It’s the start of a romance that’s destined to be short lived, the consequence of incompatibilities, unmet expectations, the arrogance of my 15-year old self. But at the moment, we kiss and touch tentatively, tenderly, while the traffic light runs through its cycles. Innocent, we’re leaning into a future of more complicated passions and inevitable sorrows.
An hour passes. The artist shows me the video. The canvas and the sitter side by side, a perfectly balanced diptych. On the left side. the time lapse records a fury of minor movement, tics, fidgets, my fingers nervously drumming the side of the couch, head jerking back and forth between the mirror and the window. On the right side. brushstrokes accumulate, each one leading to a greater definition. In both cases the speed resembles the stuttering movement of a silent film. I’m reminded of the commonplace that as we age time moves faster, each day goes by a split second quicker than the last, weeks and months speed up, years blur into each other.
The artist jokes about my expression, its brooding intensity. I’m back to remembering a rite of passage. I’m still thinking about Mary, caught up in a place, an intersection where our paths crossed briefly, mine leading to this moment, sitting for a portrait, staring at a skyline, Mary’s to a life I’m unable to follow, a different elsewhere. In contrast to the frenzy of the video, something akin to a photo, a moment distilled to an image:
A park bench,
A girl.