One step at a time. Gwenn Seemel paints portraits.

“Hand it over, sister.”

Last year, a stranger emailed me out of the blue, showered me with compliments about my work, and wrapped up the message with “hand it over, sister.”  By “it,” he meant a You Bag with his face on it.  Normally I would have mulled over the proposition some, but, considering that the stranger was none other than Kevin Cook, I acquiesced immediately, imposing just one small condition: he would have to let me paint both his faces.

Kevin is sometimes better known as Poison Waters.

When I met with Poison to do her photo session and interview, I’d seen her perform on a handful of occasions—at various events that she had MCed and one time in a play about a drag show (very meta).

But I had never seen her at Darcelle’s until last week when I went with my family to take in the show.

Poison was always charming, but never more so than at Darcelle’s where she was especially true to her tag line: she isn’t just a personality, she’s an experience!

So it’s not a surprise that, as I was working on this portrait of Poison, something a little out of the ordinary happened. 

When I re-enter a painting after I’ve put it aside for a few days or even a few hours, there’s a voice in my head that talks to me about what’s working in the composition and what isn’t. 

Often, it’s my own voice that’s talking to me. 

But usually it’s as though I’m in conversation with the subject, discussing a neck that’s too skinny or ways to fix other deformations that happen on the way to a likeness.

These conversations are partly technical—evaluating the progress of the painting—and partly a matter of keeping the subject’s who-ness present as I work. 

After all, it’s not just about getting the features right: the feel of the person is just as important. 

Imagining the way the subject speaks and how she-he might react to the work is useful (as opposed to just plain crazy).

The unusual thing about Poison’s portrait was that the subject positively took over these conversations.  She was relentless in her tips and pointers…and encouragement.

Poison Waters
2009
acrylic on one side of a canvas patchwork bag
13 x 20 inches
(detail below)

There’s just something about Poison that makes her particularly easy to keep in mind…!

Second chance

I love getting a second crack at the same face.  I created an entire conceptual series that allowed me to do this a few years ago, and I often paint friends and family repeatedly simply for the pleasure of revisiting features and personalities I love.  Each individual has more faces than she-he might like to admit, and it is difficult to capture their whole person in one portrait, but that’s only more true when it comes to Kevin Cook, the man behind Poison Waters.

I presented Kevin with his two-faced You Bag recently.*  While one side shows his alter ego, the other represents Kevin himself.

And it was the latter that was actually most difficult to paint.  I guess it makes sense really.  Everyone’s private selves are more nuanced and complex than the public faces they put on when interacting with the world, and Kevin/Poison is no exception.

Here, I had only just started Kevin’s side of the bag and I was already wiping out the left side of his face with a lighter color in order to place the structure of his features more accurately.

I struggled throughout the process with the unstretched patchwork canvas of the bag.  Warped and very rough in places, it gave me a lot to play the paint against, but it also took over when I wasn’t begin watchful. 

I had whittled Kevin’s neck down to almost nothing here.

It was important to me to capture the tilt of his head and the way he carries his shoulders because they inform what his face conveys so much, but, in looking for those expressive lines, I’d apparently lost a sense of the mass of Kevin’s neck!

Line and mass had found a happy medium by this point, but the shadows were far too deep.

Here, I had started to look for the forms I’d use in the background…

...but, as the bag as a whole started to come together, Kevin’s face began to disintegrate.

His teeth, his complexion…

...I wasn’t even sure of the shape of his face anymore!

I managed to bring it back into focus…

...and eventually figure out how his smile fits onto his face.

Kevin Cook
2009
acrylic on one side of a canvas patchwork bag
13 x 20 inches
(detail below)

Kevin wins the award for the subject who put up with the most during a photo shoot.  In order to make this half of the bag, he had my camera snapping away at him along with Oregon Art Beat’s television camera recording our every move.  That I came out of the interview with many photos worth using as a source image for a portrait is a testament to Kevin’s (and Poison’s) ability to work a crowd!

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*And Kevin’s friend Brian just happened to be there to snap some photos of Kevin meeting the painted Kevin.