The Green Chair (detail). Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
The countenances of children, wrote W.H. Auden, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
Childrens’ faces are pure geometry, studies in blank pages and architectural balance. Sometimes, when I examine them, I think I see their future selves. Sometimes I see my own.
Not long ago, one of my children asked why I had never painted a self-portrait? It occurred to me that what I wanted to paint was a self-portrait of myself as a child: what I wanted was to capture this expression, the one that says don't lie to me and stop telling me everything will be fine, because it won't.
It wasn't until I was nearly finished that I realized the painting is really all about that chair. That color: a yellowish olive so redolent of my mother's house, my mother's taste, the 1960s, all of it.
Sometimes painting portraits isn't about the sitter, but about the seat.