Introduction
When I was about five or six years old and visiting my grandparents in Los Angeles, I watched my grandfather—a big-bellied, balding man with extravagantly thick eyebrows—transform himself into a lookalike of his sister, Ethel. He donned one of my grandmother Beverly’s wigs and what she called a “house dress” – part-muumuu, part-apron—flecked with small blue flowers, then dove into her makeup kit and spent a good amount of time camouflaging his stubble with foundation powder and rouge before dragging a tube of cherry-red lipstick around his mouth in concentric circles. When he was finished, he rose from the vanity and strode out of the apartment and into the elevator, where he descended one floor and knocked on #208, where Ethel lived. When she answered and saw herself on the other side of the threshold—to be sure, a highly caricatured, pancaked-and-lipsticked version—she burst into laughter. She knew immediately who it was behind the makeup. Grandpa Sam had been a mechanical engineer at NASA in a former life, an inventor of a fuel injector that was an integral part of the first space shuttle. But he’d always had this raucous, mischievous side, an outsized zaniness fueled by the desire to entertain those he loved. He was an engine that whirred into action at the most unpredictable times, for the sole purpose of slicing into the ordinariness of the day and creating a memory out of it.
It’s my grandfather I must thank, then, for imprinting my early years with his Ethel transformations because this is, undoubtedly, at the source of my lifelong fascination with alter egos, shadow selves, evil twins, and secret identities. What struck me always, even at a young age, was my grandfather’s utter commitment and the unabashed lengths he would go to achieve his vision. As I watched him slather on makeup and straighten his wig, I noticed the way he completely immersed himself into character. It was a kind of claiming, an ownership, a full-bodied devotion to purpose. The outcome was always hilarious, but I could see it was also incredibly serious business. Transformation as art. Art as transformation.
When the pandemic hit and lockdowns began, my wife Amy and I bunked down with my in-laws. We were on the verge of moving to our new home in Maine, but because the house wasn’t yet winterized, we had to wait until the spring thaw for the water to be turned back on. The early days of life under lockdown were strange and stressful—there was so much we didn’t know yet about how this virus was moving, and everything suddenly felt dangerous and off-limits. We were all frantic to stay up to date with the news while trying not to overwhelm and frighten ourselves. And because our movements were limited and the safest place to be was inside, away from other people, Amy and I spent more hours than usual online, losing ourselves to social media. It was then when I learned of the “museum at home” Instagram challenge, first initiated by the Dutch account @tussenkunstenquarantaine and then made popular by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The challenge was to re-create a work of art using only a handful of props, and then share it online.
It was a perfect distraction for me—I began combing through the archives of museums all over the world, looking for artwork to re-create. At first, I stuck to the classics—Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit, to name a few—and then Amy suggested I try a contemporary work, one by a still-living artist. Suddenly, a new set of choices emerged. I even got my in-laws to agree to join me in the first re-creation, Keith Mayerson’s My Family. An hour after posting the image (along with Keith’s painting) on my Instagram account, I was totally gleeful to discover a comment by Keith himself! The following day, he reposted my reenactment on his Instagram account. And thus, my contemporary portrait series began.
It was an entirely different experience re-creating work from living artists. The variety of options was astonishing—a Pandora’s box of subjects and styles and settings to pick from. With the guidance of Danielle Krysa, I was able to connect with the artists personally, to reach out across the wires and time zones and countries to let them know their work was being appreciated in this new context. The re-creations began to feel like conversation openers, introductions that led to connections that transcended the boundaries of isolation the pandemic restrictions were forcing on all of us. It felt like going to the heart of things, minus the lead-up of small talk. What’s more, I found myself investigating visual art in an entirely new way; out of the restraints of a museum or gallery visit, where I could only stand back and observe, I was embodying the work, becoming the canvas. I was slipping through the frame into a narrative not of my making, but also of my making.
It was so much more than a creative exercise. These transformations became portals of change, vehicles of transcendence out of a pandemic uncertainty and the limbo of our living arrangement and the real and existential worry that was growing daily, into a space of surprising groundedness. Yes, we would sometimes laugh until our ribs hurt. But the hilarity returned us to that part of ourselves that still held a capacity, an agency, a command of our circumstances. Hilarious as it was, it was also a serious kind of business. There was so much we couldn’t control, but the daily re-creations brought us front and center with what we could.
As I prepared myself for each portrait reenactment, I couldn’t help but think about Grandpa Sam all those summers ago on the third floor of The Kensington, festooned with a wig and makeup, and the gleam in his eyes as he trotted down the carpeted hallway to the elevator. I pictured his sense of triumph as he pressed the buzzer on great-aunt Ethel’s door and listened for her footsteps. I can hear the click of the doorknob as she reached down to open it, that first instant she saw the figure before her, and the exquisite moment of recognition when she knew it was her baby brother and felt the delight and love rise up inside of her. They are long gone now, both my grandfather and Ethel, but this ribbon of joy and connection has stretched for more than 40 years inside of me, and it’s here now in these pages you are holding in your hand, and who knows? Perhaps you will take a few of its threads and stretch them even further.Â
