Portraits

By William E. King, of old men

By Jenna Russell

“WALTER IN SUN,” blue-collar menace, or squinting in the sun?

You know what your mother looks like, or your best friend. Of course you do — you’ve been looking at them for years. But when we think of the people we know best, it’s not freckles or hairstyles or wrinkles that come to mind, but their spirit or essence. They age with us, carrying our shared past, and we see in them the movement of time, not a single instant.

William E. King’s portraits, at Local 188 through August 14, are of people we’ve never met, yet they have a forcefulness of spirit that overwhelms their phsyical characteristics. These wrinkles couldn’t be more vividly depicted, but the intangibles behind them — intelligence, warmth, or anger — are what we see above all else, as if personality could be mapped in vivid color like the heat in infrared photographs. The painter has been making portraits for more than 20 years, but since a dramatic reassessment of his life four years ago, when he refocused on spirituality and character, sold his 17-room, antique-filled house in Raymond and moved to a Portland studio, his work has reached new levels, he said. The current gallery show, reopening July 10, is his first, and it marks the first phase in King’s life in which, as he describes it, the pictures on canvas match the pictures in his head.

Many of his subjects start out as strangers, picked off the streets for some indefinable spark they light in his imagination. George was a security officer King spotted smoking outside a baseball game; Richard seized his attention at an opening at Local 188. No one he has approached has refused to sit for photographs, on which King bases his works. He knows the bias against photo-based portraiture, but defends his process as central to his mission. He’s interested in capturing a single moment in all its intensity, he says, not a series of days where the sitter’s mood drifts from boredom to discomfort. Most of his subjects are older, their features eroded, and King records them with appreciative, unflinching honesty, in a controlled palette of reds, grays, and flesh tones against matte gray backgrounds.

The faces are larger than life, often caught in hot, glaring light. And though they maintain a freshness, their surfaces smooth and untortured, the paintings’ presence is weighty as granite.

The characters bear the scars of lives fully lived: skin split and ridged like tree bark, jowls pounded downward by gravity like wooden bowls shaped with stones. In “Walter, debonaire,” the man’s upper face is in shadow from his cowboy hat, and his gaze is high and distant, with hints of John Wayne. Maybe he’s acting a little, playing a part as we all have when closely observed. The possibility makes him more human. Walter is a man’s man, or so he appears; his macho demeanor contrasts brilliantly with “Diva,” a nearby portrait of a man in lipstick and heavy blush. Both pictures have presence to spare, and currents of theatricality jolting through them. Elsewhere, without the hat, “Walter in sun” casts the one-time cowboy as the neighborhood plumber or pizza man, his hairless, squinting countenance channeling blue-collar menace that may or may not be intended. (The sun could have carved the expression without his cooperation.) Thoughtful viewers will wonder why the man’s class seems so evident. (There’s no good answer, save perhaps his passing resemblance to Danny Aiello in “Do the Right Thing.”)

Richard is an average-looking, less dramatic fellow in goatee and glasses; his face is less wrinkled than Walter’s, but King revels in every smoky shadow and glossy highlight, contrasting the paleness of the face with the black shirt below it. If it’s possible to look half-surprised and half-lulled to boredom, Richard does it, and the glory of his massive head lies not in its beauty but its uniqueness, paid lavish attention. It’s the thirtysomething dot-commer as individual, not generic paper cutout.

Even when their subjects are relatively impassive, King’s portraits are unashamedly humid with attachment, compared to the chilly distance in the portraits of Alex Katz. While his interests are similar to Wil Barnett’s, King’s exclusion of setting — cats, furniture, knickknacks — is absolute. These personalities need no props.

Some of the most clear-eyed, loving portraits in the show are of Sam, a man King saw walking, hunched over, dragging his feet, in downtown Portland. The artist let his interest “bang around” in his head for a while before approaching the stranger; they talked about life over Pepperidge Farm cookies until both felt comfortable with the relationship. A “kind old soul,” King calls his subject. He could have painted Sam ten times, but settled for capturing four of his moods: “inquisitive,” “serene,” “reflective” and “pensive.” These are stark renderings of reality turned up a notch, and the creases in his flesh are as deep as cracks in the desert. Where his hand meets his face, Sam’s beauty is complete.

Just as memorable are “Richard Lee” and “Richard, gaze to Heaven,” of a fellow artist, who looks all-knowing and forgiving in the former picture, and like a blue-eyed saint or angel in the latter. White hair floats around his head like a halo as he leans on a walking stick. His body hints at its own collapse, drawing his soul uncommonly close to the surface. Like most of King’s subjects, the man stands on the far side of suffering, old enough to have lost, fought acceptance, and finally embraced the pain for what it taught him. It’s a struggle King himself admits to surviving. The paintings he’s produced on the other side of his experience prove, once again, that nothing worth doing is easy.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.