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Matt Held's Facebook Portraits at Denise Bibro
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Matt Held, Julie V (Courtesy the artist)
Painters using photographs are hardly new. Even Degas had his treasure trove of photographic sources. But what struck me seeing Matt Held's show of "Facebook Portraits" isn't the novelty of his approach but the lush way he approaches painting. Held paints largish portraits from people's profile pictures on Facebook, many of whom he doesn't know. Too often, paintings from photographs can be dead and servile. But seeing the work in person was enlivening and provocative.
Something about seeing a large grouping of them in person made me start thinking about the generational aspects of these portraits. People's self-images include wacky poses, people in costumes, tattoos, piercings, exotic lands, inexplicable props, facial hair, a cigar, bubble gum, and a snorkel. Portrait artists have always used props to reflect character, but here we have a historical moment's sensibility enshrined in Held's creamy oil paint.
When I first discovered Held's project, there were fewer than 200 people looking to have their Facebook profile picture painted by him. Now there are thousands -- enough to break the Facebook architecture for groups and friends and fans.
Click here to see more of Matt Held's Facebook portraits
A group of Matt Held's Facebook portraits is on view at Denise Bibro Fine Art through this Saturday, Oct. 3. I decided to e-mail Matt and ask him a few questions about the project.
Harry Swartz-Turfle: What made you start the Facebook portraits? What was the work like before that?
Matt Held: Essentially, I started with a portrait of my wife. I had been having problems with skin tone and struggling to find good source material (I’ve always painted from photographs). I was going through her Facebook page and came across one of the photos she had put up – angry face, disheveled hair, and finger kind of waging war at the camera. I thought it might make an interesting painting.
As I was working through it, everything just seemed to click. The process felt good, the paint application and brushstrokes just felt right. So I started going through my friends' profile pictures and pulling others off to paint and I began to see this project kind of come together – how people represent themselves and control through photo selection how they want others to see them. My wife came up with the idea for the group and it just took off from there.
Before this project, I would start a series of paintings, get to about 12 pieces and not really feel too passionate about what I was doing. It wasn’t that I wasn’t passionate about painting, but the subjects themselves would kind of dry up so to speak. Plus, I would send out slides or an email to friends and it was just, you know … crickets.
HST: It's funny what an interested audience will do for your way of thinking about painting. For a long time, photography kind of owned the debate about how we see ourselves in portraiture. Now that digital technology has made any kind of representation possible, photography can be anything. I can put my head on Arnold Schwarzenegger's body, or choose to put only my best moments on Facebook and perception of my reality becomes something much more flexible. I was really intrigued going around your show that it could really become a portrait of a moment in this particular subculture, like you're the Lewis Hine of hip, 20- & 30-somethings who live a lot of their lives online. When you're deciding who to paint, do you feel the need to represent different kinds of people, or is it more that you're following your personal interest? Put another way, I wonder if after 200 paintings the project will be a portrait of early Facebook or a portrait of your own sensibility?
MH: That’s a really interesting question. Hine’s photographs were social commentary in the most thoughtful way, I think, about the struggles of his time. I don’t know that these portraits are as thoughtful, but I see what you are saying. In respect to what I choose to paint, it’s kind of difficult to discuss and put in the construct of what people want to hear. It just kind of happens. I go along and sometimes say, “oh I should try and find a picture of this kind of person, or that, or it would be cool to paint this, or I would like to challenge myself a bit in this area”. I know that sounds vague but I also don’t like divulging everything about my process. It is my own sensibility but I think there are other less constructed things that sort of appear along the way with projects like this that document some specific action or area of human life.
HST: I was surprised walking into the gallery at how big the paintings are, and also how painterly (for lack of a better word). They're so much more luscious in person. For me, there is a real change in seeing them digitally and seeing them in person. I used to talk to artists who refused to release images of their paintings digitally because the reproduction couldn't match the actual object, but this attitude seems to be much rarer now. Have the Facebook portraits challenged this idea at all for you?
MH: There is a big difference between the physical paintings and the digital reproduction most people are seeing on the web. My wife and I take the photos but neither of us are professional photographers. We have a pretty decent Canon Rebel, but sometimes we have a hell of a time getting a decent photo. I guess you could say it’s a bit risky to do that as some of the images – if not taken well – could be, I guess, gross misinterpretations of the physical piece. Thank god for Photoshop! Still, you can go through the gallery on Facebook and my website now and there are a few I wish looked better, but there is only so much I can do without hiring a professional - and I just simply can't afford it. But yeah, the paintings are more rich, and I am sure that could be said about a lot of work out there. You make a good point though: it's always a better idea to get out and see work in person.
That said, I think there is a bigger demand for artists to have digital images now. It’s become the norm. I don’t know too many people or organizations that accept slides anymore and so I think it would be very difficult to get noticed if you were an un-established artist still trying to make it analog. I have to get all my old work – still on slides – transferred over digitally. That is a pain in the ass, but you know, artists have to be adaptable to a certain extent, and the second digital started coming in to play I was all over it. It’s just so much easier, cheaper, faster.
HST: Most of the folks who see your work will see it online, which as an artist can drive me crazy to think my pieces live a larger life online than in person. But there's a flip side to this, which is that the opportunities for audience is bigger and hopefully more in-depth. You can make connections across the continent that were previously quite difficult. With your new online project at Kickstarter, you're poised to continue and deepen that audience connection while hopefully building a more sustainable professional life. Do you think there are any drawbacks for artists to committing their work to be online like this?
MH: I know artists tend to have a lot of ideologies of how things should be in terms of the profession. There are certain things I've had to let go of. I think the hardest and best thing to happen to me was that I was unable to finish my degree. I left my senior year because my mother got sick and I felt it was more important to be with her. Because of that one decision, which was absolutely the right decision, I've had to work that much harder to improve my skill, and prove my worth but it wasn't happening for me trying the traditional route of building up a body of work and going through the process of submitting work to galleries unsolicited and then waiting months only to be rejected. It's stifling. Going online was the next logical step. Like you said, it is harder to know that while the work is getting so much attention online, few get to see the physical pieces. Those who have seen them in person -- it's just a completely different and more real experience. I would love it if everyone could see and experience the work, but that is just another ideal I have to let go of, and I am fine with that ... for now. You have to strike a balance and I feel I've done a fairly good job of that. The works speaks for itself and the connection I have made with my audience is so valuable. Many artists don't get the chance to connect with their audience as deeply as I am able and I am grateful that I can do that, now. I am certainly focused on making this as public a project as I can and being accessible as I can -- to an extent -- this way I am fully able to do that.
I think the hardest thing about being an artist and being completely focused on making a profession out of making art is that you are completely dependent on either grants or sales of work or both. Platforms like Kickstarter -- which is such a fantastic idea -- are really giving artists and other creative types, more control on just simply completing a project. There is so little funding for the arts and so many of us are applying and competing for the same grants. You know, there is only so much to go around.
HST: It's true that there's only so much money to go around, but I love the democratization that's happening. More artists are going direct with their work, and I think that's a major shift. I also love the way artists are sharing information online, too. As a painter and as a how-to nerd, I'd love to hear more about your process of making a painting after you've chosen a photo to work with. Can you share a little bit about your process?
MH: It's true. I doubt I would be talking to you if the shift wasn't happening - not that I want to attribute all my successes to the world wide web, but not to acknowledge it would be silly.
I actually go back and forth between a Venetian red underpainting or a blue/grey gesso depending on what's closest to me when I am ready to prep canvas. I guess that is the first step. Then I draw the image on the canvas. (I am and always have used oil paint. I love the smell and the mixing and how luminous it is in its application. It doesn't dry as fast as acrylic so I can rework something if it needs it.) Most of the time I keep the focus on the figure so I rarely include background. However, there are a couple of pieces in the collection that wouldn't have made sense or had as much impact if they were completely removed from the environment such as Dan or Duc or Astley. Sometimes I'll keep the same color that exists in the background of the original photo but change the shape, etc. The figure itself is rarely changed or at least not intentionally. I tend to struggle with ears or noses sometimes as my wife likes to point out.
HST: At this point, you've done around 70 Facebook portraits. What are the biggest surprises and unexpected obstacles you've faced? Do you feel any differently about the idea of people's Facebook portraits today?
MH: The biggest challenge has been working through the technical limitations of Facebook. If you are someone like me whose audience is growing, you are limited to 5,000 friends. The group has 9,350 members and I can't look through profiles unless we are friends so that kind of blows. Plus sending messages to people individually is now an impossibly arduous task. You can only email 20 people at a time and you don't have the option to message members of the group once it goes over 5,000. Joelle started a fan page thinking that might help, but it didn't in the way we hoped, so we started a second profile page. It's a TON of work to keep up with and It gets a bit frustrating because I'd rather just be in the studio.
I think about people who've helped me out and wonder what would have happened if I had rejected their friend request. You know this project has a duality. It takes place on Facebook for source material but also for networking. As far as the profiles themselves, I think a lot of people are quirky and cool, some share too much information and don't think through what they put out for the world to see, a lot of people are crazy as hell, a lot of people share the same views on life. How much a person's photo is truly representative of who they are is sometimes dead on and sometimes you can tell people are really just trying to hard. BUT - it's not that different from real life. We are also so varied and different yet all share the same desire to connect.
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