Jen Starling and Tom Torge

Portrait of Jen Starling, she’s my girlfriend, and this is one of the many ways I could paint her, and there’s a lot of more ways I would like to paint her. I don’t think any single portrait encapsulates a person. It’s a momentary glimpse, and the light is always changing, expressions are changing. The problem with portraiture, really it’s that our experiences with people, that people are animated and they’re moving and our view of a person is a composite of expression and light and angles and all kinds of things. It’s, there’s no single image that captures a person, so, that’s a good reason to paint her again.

The painting of Tom Torch. He was a guy I had known and he was an artist in my class in Glenwood Springs many years ago. And then he moved to Denver about the same time I moved to Denver. I thought he was compelling to look at and had all kinds of stories just in his appearance.

He’d been a ski coach and that was the heightened part of his life. At this time he was an artist. He was an interesting person and kind of lonely. When he died, my phone stopped ringing. He’s the only person that ever called me.