Pastel Portrait
A MONA Moment |
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I knew him as the nice old museum volunteer that came in on Tuesdays to volunteer in the gift shop and count the money in the donation jar. Of course, he was much more than that: Jack Shofstall was a businessman and high school art teacher, well known and liked in his community. Jack died recently, but our visual memory of him will continue through a portrait of him in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art by Kearney artist, Virginia Wattles.
Wattles primary medium is pastel, and her specialty is portraiture. We normally associate this medium with intensely hued colors. But in Wattles portraits the focus is personality. The color range is limited, in keeping with Jack's taste for the unpretentious. We see salmon, gray and off white arrayed over Jack's box-like torso. This angularity suggests a physical characteristic of his, a stiffness to his gait, the frailty of advanced age very evident when he walked.
Jack had wit and a sense of irony. In this portrait, the tilt of the neck, the squinting eyes--ostensibly from the glare of the sun--the ironic curve of his lips, combine into a convenient visual shorthand suggesting Jack's sardonic turn of mind. A sense of shrewdness-developed perhaps from his years as a businessman--crossed with a touch of casual jauntiness is all in his hands, the left one tucked in his pocket, the right one pursed around a cigarette, poised and ready to circle and make a point.
A black gouache background keeps our focus on the subject, and richens the coloring of the off-white, Perry Como style sweater. The grain of the pastel gives the surface texture, and faintly suggests the third dimension against the liquid sheerness of the black washed background. The total impact of color and line keeps coming back to the essential elements of individual personality, how like other skilled portraitists Wattles keeps focussed on the main subject at hand: communicating through art something of the life of one specific individual, and make him interesting and unique to us.
