Mike Reynolds' portrait of me, discovered on facebook
I likely spend too much time checking my facebook. Perhaps this is because my actual social life is pretty much on hold while we child rear. Facebook allows me to check up on what I am missing. It turns out an awful lot of my facebook peers also seem to be in the same situation judging by the volume of baby pictures that are coming down my news feed. But there is also a lot of art being made, and some of it looks pretty damn good.
Earlier this year, very shortly after my second little one was born, I discovered a painting of me on facebook. Naturally I loved the painting. I immediately responded to the brilliant choice of subject matter. I also love the illusion to Otto Dix, one of my absolute all time favorite painters. Perhaps the artist knew I reference the great German expressionist frequently in my own work and secretly hope people see my grand project as an heir to Dix’s nuanced critique of the Wiemar era bourgeois? Anyway, I loved the painting.
Mike Reynolds, an LA based painter, and I are friends on facebook but have not met in actuality. It turns out that Mike has an on going project in which he paints people who come up frequently on his facebook news feed. At the end of last year I was posting a lot of drawings from my 100 Little Deaths project and I must have been cluttering up Mike’s news feed. Luckily for me I caught the facebook portraitist’s attention. I looked into Mike’s work and found we have a fair amount in common art-wise. While I spent my early 20s painting Tupac Shakur, Mike seems to have devoted his early years to Justin Bieber. He also does other neat socially oriented projects that engage his painting community. Each week Mike takes a fellow painter out to dinner, soliciting his dates online. I loved the generosity of Mike’s work and I simply had to own his painting of me.
I contacted Mike via facebook and told him how much I love the painting. I suggested that I paint a portrait of Mike and we trade paintings. Mike dug the idea and I got to work.