Vogue's Gallery
Françoise Gilot
Françoise Gilot’s long life and body of work have been well documented, including in her best-selling memoir, Life with Picasso, so there’s not much I can add to her biography here. And anyway, my only motivation in crafting this portrait of her was to gently antagonize my bestest Comrade in Art, J. Daniel Abel, whose opinion of Gilot’s art is, I think I can safely say, less than glowing.
But while compiling reference for my artwork above, I noticed a tendency I think Mr. Abel might appreciate.
You see, those of us working to promote ourselves as Art Professionals sometimes find ourselves the subject of press coverage, however fluffy. Perhaps we appear in a little newspaper filler now and then about an upcoming exhibition or the release of a new book, etc. And invariably, when photos are involved, the journalists tackling this hard-hitting story tend to direct the shoot in predictable ways. As such, there I was in my early days, appearing in print articles, dutifully sitting at the drafting table, pencil in hand, miming the work of a dedicated young artist. After a couple of these embarrassments (one of which had me dressed in a suit and tie), I vowed never again to be manipulated into such a humiliating pose.
Aside from finding the cliché predictable, I resisted the implication that I was a slave to my studio, a happy introvert obsessive, grinding out hours of entertainment graphics like a busy worker bee. Writers, I reasoned, are rarely photographed sitting at an IBM Selectric like workaday secretaries. An author is photographed on an urban street or wandering a garden path, communing with the environments that inspire them, or else posing in the expensive living rooms their book sales have financed. Visual artists, by contrast, are photographed in the studio, paint and clay flung willy nilly, looking as if they’ve had no human contact in months. However true, this was not the impression I hoped to promote.
So I was amused to see that Françoise Gilot apparently shared none of this hesitation. She was clearly eager to accept any photographer’s command to sit at the easel, unconvincingly posing as if interrupted in the course of another masterpiece, painting, as she surely did, while dressed in her most fashionable outfits and accessories. She even acquiesced to posing at her gallery openings, brushes in hand, pretending to put the finishing touches on large canvases already framed and hanging in the exhibition. Whatever the photog wants. Anything to push the product.
And well, Gilot lived to 101, having enjoyed world renown and well-compensated productivity, while this post will receive three likes and invite no further inquiry. Obviously, one of us has the wrong idea.
- A.H.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)