They are our Kings our Queens, the vespers that fix our gaze in permanent auto focus.  Their breath breaths heavier, is worth more.  They possess the rarified gift that for them the curtain will always open.  The cocktail of celebrity will always be served, and they will go on living life anyway, simply, to the constant roar of the crowd.

  Rock stars and models are the general population’s beau ideals.  They live as we want to live and look as we want to look.  Their images, flooding magazine racks, shopping malls, and highway billboards, are archetypes of individualism sold en masse.  That in mind, you’d think such obvious, overexposed faces would be the last subject matter suited to art- or at least to those artists who wish to express something beyond Warhol’s flat screen-printed movie stars.  You’d think.  But two very different artists have taken such personae on, and the result proves that even famous faces can have dramatic double lives.

  Anouk, Isabelli, Filippa, Carmen.  Twenty-two-year-old Joseph Stalnaker has spent the last year and a half completing his series castings.  The series consists of ten close up portraits, drawn in pencil, of models, the source of the work being runway-casting Polaroids, taken at his day job as an assistant to designer Narciso Rodriguez.  “Each of the models has such personality, even though they were doing the same exact thing,” Stalnaker explains.  “Some were bold, some shy.  But people never get to see models looking like this.  Its really them no matter how much they tried to sugar coat it.”   Stalnaker captures both a far more humanised and a far darker version of these women.  The paper is heavily worked with graphite, producing a moody, looming atmosphere so at odds with the usual glamorous backdrop set behind them for Bazaar or Vogue (or, for that matter, V).  His brilliant draftsmanship and precise detail allow for a complex range of readings.  Each model’s expression registers somewhere vague on the emotional register, forcing the viewer to study the face more intimately.  In this sense Stalnaker has performed a one-two on the modeling profession.  He has robbed his subjects of their one talent-their ability to present a perfect face, empty of history and emotion, for the camera to record.

  If Stalnaker mines for interior emotion, British-born painter Mary Nicholson relies on her star’s commercial talents to dictate the look of her work.  Over the last year and a half, Nicholson has amassed an extraordinary series of musician portraits.  Everyone from David Bowie, Diana Ross, Johnny Rotten, and Michael Jackson to Thelonious Monk, Cappadonna of Wu-Tang, Mariah Carey, and Arthur Lee has made an appearance on her canvases (thirty-seven have been produced thus far).  Like Stalnaker she uses a photograph as source material, choosing a shot of the musician carefully and methodically.  “I find one that is rich in tone,” Nicholson says, “with strong light values and an interesting expression.  I don’t pick ones that are too well known   I’m not going to paint John Lennon wearing his New York City T-shirt.”

  If Nicholson selects her subject by admiration for their music, she also paints by it.  “I make each painting with a specific soundtrack.  That way the subject rally takes over.  I get into a trance and hardly know what’s going on.”   In effect Nicholson paints by performance, summoning the up-front attitude of her subject to give the portrait authenticity, a life that couldn’t come through tin the original photo.  And unlike Stalnaker’s drawings, which have their lineage in photo-realism, her paintings are all about expression.  She uses sparse kinetic strokes to catch the star’s hard-rock face, and it’s this economy of line that takes her work away from mere fan worship.  To a degree, both artists have pushed away the cameras and the crowds.  There they are finally.  We can see them for ourselves.

Christopher Bollen

V Magazine.   Jan/Feb 2003