Inspiration in art sometimes comes from strange sources. One of my tasks as I prepare for the reunion of my 1953 class at Carleton College has been to draw portraits of classmates for Beyond the Tower, a book of biographies to be presented to them at the reunion. I say "task," but actually it was a lot of fun, plus it allowed me to renew and refine some of my artistic skills, particularly using a brush to draw black and white portraits based on their yearbook photos from long ago.

It also led to an opportunity to exhibit my work at the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, Michigan. The May exhibit will be titled "Heads and Tales," a play on the fact that Beyond the Tower will include both my portraits (heads) and the biographies (tales) of my classmates. I sold Jennifer Vickers on the exhibit partly because two of my classmates were involved in separate aspects of the theatre. Richard Christiansen is the retired theatre critic of the Chicago Tribune. Kay Chapin has been the script supervisor for every Woody Allen film since Annie Hall.

At some point I got the idea of doing a portrait of Laurence McKinley Gould, who was president of Carleton during my years there. Earlier, Gould, a geologist, had served as second in command of Admiral Byrd's 1928 expedition to Antarctica. Gould wrote a book titled Cold, which I had never read until this winter. I was surprised how current it still seems three-quarters of a century after it had been written. In looking for a photograph of Gould that could serve as base for my portrait, I chose the one on the cover of that book as featured on the web site for the Carleton book store.

Manipulating the image

I began to manipulate the photo image in my computer, enlarging it so it would be easier to copy. Then an interesting thing happened. Because the Gould image was so small, when I enlarged it, instead of a clear image, I was confronted by a crosshatch of pixels. This intrigued me, particularly because I was familiar with the work of Chuck Close, the artist who uses a series of squares and dots to form portrait images. Viewed from a few feet away, Close's paintings seem speckled. Viewed from across the gallery room, they appear almost photographic. It is a style that has been dubbed "photorealism by art critics.

As I post this to the Internet in March 2003, I have just completed the Gould portrait. I began by printing the pixel image, then enlarging it in a photocopy machine. Next, I used an ordinary ball-point pen to outline the pixels in a grid, cross-numbering each square. I did the same on a 30 by 40 inch canvas, which allowed me to paint colored squares on the canvas similar in position to the pixel squares on my photocopy.

Does the painting look like the Laurence Gould I remember as college president? Not when you're standing close, but the further and further you move from the canvas, the more clearly does his likeness materialize. Art can be fascinating, particularly with the tools we now have in the twenty-first century.

--Hal Higdon

Preliminary	Finished Painting

The art of Hal Higdon