Kenton and Daniel The Prophet

 Kenton. And Daniel the Prophet, it’s a self portrait. I painted myself in a sort of fantasy as being the Old Testament prophet Daniel. And in one of the many narratives in that book of the Bible, there’s the writing on the wall. And the writing on the wall has to do with Doomsday forecast, a prophecy. Hey, he was a prophet.

He made prophecies. The writing on the wall. For me, it sort of morphed into the idea of, you know, this ecological disaster that we’re facing on this only planet that we have. Kenton, I met him on the street, on Colfax, and the guys really jump on it when I pay them some money to take their photographs.

And he was a stunningly amazing looking guy. His hair was combed, he was clean, he had clean clothes, so I don’t really think he was quite as down on his luck. Part of what I love painting on this was the storm of hair and this undercurrent of hair going one direction and the upper layer, like the atmosphere, going a different direction.

The beard, that’s one of the most successful. I wish I could do that again, but I just can’t seem to get those lines to form the same again. Beards actually make it easier to do a male portrait because half the face is gone. All you really have is the eyes. Eyes and nose. So I painted myself. I just went unshaven for a few months. I didn’t have to look for guys on the street, raggedy homeless guys. I was one of them myself. It teaches me to realize that there’s maybe one synaptic lapse away for me to be in the exact same position. The striped cloth is something I’m enamored of. And I have to admit that my first attachment came from the painting by Vermeer called Artist in a Studio or the Allegory on the Art of Painting.

That’s what it’s really called. It’s not even striped, it’s pieces of cloth overlapping. Anyway, it looks like stripes and I like striped shirt. But it also has a hint of Judaic tradition, Hebrew tradition, the striped cloth. It looked like an old, what an Old Testament prophet might be wearing. The other reasons I like striped cloth is they give a really nice contour of the form that it’s draped on.

Each of them kind of radiates in a slightly different direction and follows the form and that’s why I like it.