Posted on 06/24/2006 8:57:16 PM PDT by Darkshadow
Whether painting the wrinkled face of a farmer, the long shadows cast by a man shoveling snow or the inquisitive face of his young son, Shorewood artist David Lenz wants to tell the truth through images that are as close to reality as possible.
 David Lenz |
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Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery "Sam and the Perfect World" depicts David Lenzs 9-year-old son and won the top prize in a National Portrait Gallery competition. |
| Archived Coverage |
In January and February of 2001, reporter Crocker Stephenson of the Journal Sentinel wrote a special series titled "Canvas & Plow" about Lenz and two of his subjects, dairy farmers Erv and Mercedes Wagner. 2001 Series: 'Canvas & Plow' |
| Related Links |
 National Portrait Gallery: Lenz' online journal |
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A painting by David Lenz. |
His straightforward realism has been unfashionable in the art world, which makes it extraordinary that he has taken the top prize in one of the nation's most prestigious portrait competitions.
The National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was to give its top prize to Lenz on Friday night in its first-ever national portrait competition, which attracted more than 4,000 emerging and midcareer artists.
"We're not about fashionability here, there is no question," says Marc Pachter, director of the Portrait Gallery. "The toughest problem in art is having words chase what is a visceral experience, but . . . one of the things that happens in an excellent portrait is an engagement. You want to know the person; you want to know their world."
The person in Lenz' winning portrait, "Sam and the Perfect World," is his 9-year-old son Sam, who has Down syndrome. In the painting, Sam leans forward quizzically and confidently meets the viewer's gaze. Behind him, beyond a barbed-wire fence that runs low across the frame, a lush valley opens up and a sun stands high with a halo-like ring around it.
The natural world is precise, rendered with almost photographic precision, and yet it verges on something magical and ideal, like the "Golden Valley" in C.S. Lewis' Narnia. Sam seems connected to this world but also separate from it.
"This creates a mystery," Pachter says. "We don't really know who the boy is. We don't understand . . . It invites us to wonder about him."
For about 17 years, Lenz has painted children from Milwaukee's inner city and, more recently, two dairy farmers from south-central Wisconsin, Erv and Mercedes Wagner.
When Lenz read about the contest last year, though, he decided that he would do something different, something he had dreamed of doing for many years - a painting of Sam.
"The experience of being Sam's father changed me to the core," Lenz wrote in an online journal that was part of the portrait competition's Web site. "And I knew someday Sam's influence, his point of view, would come to bear on my art."
Lenz won $25,000 and a commission for the National Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. The gallery will choose the subject, attempting to find a person to whom Lenz would have a connection, Pachter says.
(Lenz was in Washington, D.C., for the award ceremony on Friday evening and did not know he had won at the time of this writing.)
Jurors in the competition included Trevor Fairbrother, an independent curator; Thelma Golden, director of The Studio Museum in Harlem, N.Y.; artist Sidney Goodman; Katy Siegel, a professor of art history and criticism at Brandeis University in Massachusetts; Pachter; the gallery's deputy director, Carolyn K. Carr; and Brandon Fortune, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the gallery.
In April 2007, a show titled "Wisconsin's People on the Land," including Lenz's paintings of the Wagners and their farm, will open at the James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Madison.
It's called a 'sun-dog'. You don't see them often...
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