Arts Council of Monterey County Grant Enables "Boomers" Portrait Project
Beginning this month and over the next twelve-month period I’ll seek out, interview and photograph a dozen or so members of a specific group of Monterey County residents. This will be the prelude to painting their portraits and writing their biographical essays. Qualified residents who volunteer for my project are those born between the years of 1946 and 1964 - in other words Baby Boomers, the generation born in the immediate wake of World War II. Project participants will represent diverse ethnicities, cultural traditions, gender orientations and socio-economic backgrounds. These portraits, along with the corresponding biographical essays I write will be the subject of a public art exhibition a year from now.
Through a generous grant from the Arts Council of Monterey County my project Boomers of Monterey County will allow me to apply my unique visual style to portraits of an aging demographic that represents nearly a quarter of the U.S. population – a demographic in which I also belong. At a time where “Boomer” is a word some consider an epithet, I design this project to convey to that subject population that “You matter. You matter to the well-being of this country, to history and to me. You deserve to be seen and heard.” The project serves as a retrospective for those of us within that demographic, and as visual reminders of the commonalities shared with younger folk as well as the unique challenges those of our generation face. I’ll also explore through this project the ethics of portraiture, the implied vulnerability versus empowerment of the person who gazes as opposed to the one who is “seen”, the historical traditional portrait-painter power imbalances and how this relates to gender and class.
The magical realist surreal portraits I paint will be unlike what one might imagine of commissioned formal portraits in which the posed sitter is the clear the subject of the portrait. The Boomers of Monterey County project does not simply document the physical likeness of someone at a given point in that person’s life passage. My portrait paintings are undeniably as much about my perception of another and the personal choices I make to graphically render what I observe. As I believe is the case with all art, a portrait painting is ultimately a three-way conversation among the minds of sitter, artist and ultimately the viewers of the portraits at any given time in history.
I will offer Boomer volunteers a small monetary compensation - that’s right, the artist is paying the portrait subjects. Participants will sign model releases allowing me to take as many photographs as necessary to capture the candid expressions of their emotional and intellectual engagement with me in conversation about their lives. However, while these photographs serve solely as my visual references. I’m not aiming toward strict photographic likenesses in their painted portraits.
As a departure from my usual acrylic painting styles, this time I envision mixing different media, rendering their portraits with collage, acrylic, oil and spray paints. I’ll paint this new series of portraits in as new, experimental and bold a visual style as the way I now feel, rendering as tightly or as loosely, as literally or as fantastically as my interpretation of the sitters and their environment dictate. I would like these new portraits to be as much a revelatory surprise to me as they’ll be to my sitters and the public viewing them. I anticipate this creative art project could be the most challenging for me to date in many ways.
If you’re a member of the Baby Boomer generation and are interested in possibly participating in this project over the next twelve month period, I would gratefully invite you to contact me immediately at info@edwardmcorpus.art; and If you haven’t as yet done so, please sign up for my Art of Dreams newsletter to keep abreast of the project and upcoming exhibitions.
