Portraiture

This is Mary Evelyn Harju's masterful portrait of me on Avenue A in the East Village, also in 2007. Turns out, for several months in the spring of 1999, I had lived on Avenue A in Alphabet City, as the neighborhood is called. At that time, nothing had really coalesced around me and books. By 2007, I was a much more consolidated presence. The way Mary set up the pictorial composition here is amazing, and had to have been done on the fly. For a visual artist who took heat for being too plodding, too methodical, it proves that Mary could be inspired in an impulsive way, too. The wackiness of Mary's balance of elements often meant that when she had a camera rather than paints, she could indulge herself in impulsive moves, against the idea of too much conscious craft. In this case, all the elements came together in such a way that she managed to set up a compositional structure as satisfying as the ones in her best paintings. She was happy to let elements fall in place as they may.