Portrait of an artist

April 17, 2017During my first studio visit with John Baldessari, about a decade ago, when he still cooked up his ideas from a low-rent, rough-edged compound behind a surfboard shop in Santa Monica, he pointed out a chair beside a towering stack of books. With a simple metal frame and basic wood seat, it looked […]

Artist Drawing Girl's Portrait at Her Studio

[Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts - Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm]

Channeling M.C. Escher and the Droste effect, more broadly, a Chicago-based artist has been painting portraits of himself painting portraits of himself. Seamus Wray, who’s appeared in a similar project shared on Colossal, began with a single representation (shown above) and mirrored his pose in a photograph of the work. He then repeated that process five times, which resulted in a recursive, mixed-media series that changes slightly with each iteration—two cats make an appearance in the final…

From Jimmy Buffett outside his Palm Beach, Florida, home to Misty Copeland stretching her legs in Manhattan, the portraits show just how much our personality is reflected in where we live.