Around the time I started painting, it became clear that my favorite artists throughout history painted men, but my favorite contemporary figurative artists mostly focused on female subjects. Contemporary male portraits seemed reserved for “important” men, that is, conventionally powerful men. I wondered if men could be portrayed with the same vulnerability and intimacy that had been used to such great effect by my contemporaries in their paintings of women.
My models are the beardos, surfers, slicksters, femmes, machos, dandies, and neo-hippies that populate social media, where the ubiquitous selfie has made the painted portrait all the more special. I’m interested in documenting the versions of masculinity these men represent while re-introducing the intimate and the sensual to the contemporary male portrait.
