Paul Hodgson and the New Commission

Paul's models, hired young actors, his colleagues, himself, all in contemporary street clothes, magically attained the visual grandeur of old world aristocrats. "Contemporary" and "grandeur" are adjectives not often found in each other's company. If the double portrait possessed the eloquence of Ingres; a self-portrait of Paul in a black turtleneck had all the arrogance and hauteur of a Bronzino. The price was £1,500 or roughly $2,250. Suddenly my interest in the other artist evaporated and I dropped everything to get as much information as possible. Paul Hodgson, the digital artist, was an award-winning recent graduate of the Royal College of Art. A Londoner, 28, he was yet to have his first solo show. The gallery believed Hodgson was on the verge of a great career (and knowing them, they didn't say that about all their artists). Immediately the collector gears started whirring in my head. "Would he," I enquired, "be willing to do a commission?" I was hoping to persuade him to do a portrait of me. The dealer said it might be possible, but the price could not be sustained at that level because the production costs are very high, and the artist depends on producing multiple copies of his works to cover expenses.

Here was a dilemma. As a collector I have admired great portraiture around the world and often wondered what it would feel like to appear in one. Paul Hodgson, this brand new discovery with a penetrating gift for character and style might answer that question. But if I had to pay the price of an entire edition to get just one picture then the cost would be prohibitive.

Paul Hodgson Masquerade 2001
unique pigment print on paper, 49 3/4 x 70 inches,
also published as an iris print on paper, edition of 5, 31-1/3 x 44 inches.

So I proposed a solution. If Paul would simply use me as a model for any piece in any attitude in any manner that would suit him, then I would promise to purchase one print of the resulting edition. The gallery reached Paul on his mobile phone and we met that afternoon. I showed him the catalog of my collection including several portraits I'd posed for by other noted artists. We discussed his work and Paul demonstrated a deep knowledge of the art-historical, socio-political and psychological aspects of the masterworks his own pictures emulate. He was the real thing. We had a deal.

But it didn't work out right away. Although I'd arranged a return trip to London expressly to see Paul the following June, the gallery suddenly failed to complete the transaction with no satisfactory explanation. This was a crushing disappointment. Although I tried I could not reach Paul. Then at the next annual art fair they admitted Paul had moved to another gallery. By coincidence he was just preparing the opening of his first one-man show there. So I ventured over to the Houldsworth Gallery on Cork Street, London's toniest venue for contemporary art, to see what would happen. Paul's new work was already hung although the vernissage was a few days off. The show was more complex, more subtle, more audacious if that word can apply to Paul, than the earlier works I had seen. His work had grown and deepened remarkably. He had received brilliant notices in London's major press, and museums had already purchased and exhibited the work. Work on this level could not be passed up. I decided to buy my favorite even if he'd never do the commission. Even if the gallery were nasty and Paul a total jerk. But I introduced myself to the gallery and told them my history with Paul including the big disappointment. They got Paul on the phone and within minutes we were back on track. I purchased one piece from this dazzling digital debutant and invited him to see it in New York once it was back from the framer. A few months later there was Paul in my apartment among a small group of my art world friends. His piece, "Masquerade," was a big hit among the New Yorkers, as was Paul. An art-critic observed, "Many talented young artists are egomaniacal or brash, and Paul is neither."

That August I returned to London. Paul had decided to use me in one of his characteristic non-specific portraits. I was to bring "very tailored clothing, quite fitted". I made my way to London from Stockholm (where I was visiting my two godsons - I adore the city) with three full changes of clothes from head to toe-tweed, blazer and white tie. Let it be a measure of my dedication to this project that I lugged an 80-pound suitcase to Stockholm, London, then Stockholm again and back to New York to pull it off.

We met at a District Line tube station near his studio, then located at Dace Road, Fish Island, Bow. Paul's studio was in a decidedly low rent East London building, also working quarters for 50 other artists. It was intriguing and ironic and a little romantic to think that such elegant and fascinating work would emerge from such humble, rough-edged surroundings.

Paul had constructed a small, elaborate stage set with a clubby leather armchair beside a desk on which he had arranged a half dozen props-a suggestion of antiquarian books tied with colored ribbons, a marble bust, a leaf of writing paper, all before a wall of faux-marble and a blank space for a window to be added later, digitally. But before I costumed myself in my first outfit I was surprised to find that Paul's images are recorded not digitally, but on film. Digital files are unreliable, according to Paul. "Who can say whether in ten years imaging programs will still read our current digital data?" So Paul initially shoots his images on a large-format color film, then they are scanned into digital form for later manipulation and blending into a final digital image. That way at least the source material can be preserved indefinitely. He took lighting tests with a comparatively low-tech Polaroid.

Paul positioned me in the armchair with minute care, precisely dictating where each limb and finger should rest. He adjusted some velvety draped fabric on the set for color balance and compositioning reasons. An off-white satiny fabric draped over the armchair photographed inappropriately like a waterfall. A burgundy fabric on the arm of the chair merged with the velvet draped behind. In all he shot about 16 poses. None of them was likely to be perfect, Paul advised, but he could make them so by importing fragments of other shots to create the final image.

New Land 2003 iris print on paper, 44 x 30 inches, edition of 5; pigment print on paper, 72 x 49 inches, edition of 3	Boy With Landscape 2001 unique pigment print on paper, 72 x 42.5 inches; Iris print on paper, edition of 5, 44 x 26 inches

Most artists I know have completed, unsold works all over their studios, along with volumes of preparatory sketches. Not Paul. For planning and reference there was hardly anything other than a few magazine clippings and a coffee-table book of the old masters turned to a portrait of a 17th Century grandee by Van Dyck, which appeared to be a source for this sitting. Four hours later we had finished. I left London and speculated as to what Paul would add through the window. I emailed some suggestions - a romantic, cloudy sky? A New York skyline at dusk? A wooded landscape? The Unisphere? Then, after a few months Paul confessed it was taking longer than he predicted to produce just the right thing. What had developed was that as Paul and I got to know each other the subject of the portrait had changed - rather than being a non-specific portrait of a generic art-historical personage it gradually evolved into a portrait of me as an individual, and that may have been what was causing the delay of the window view - how to make the window reflect the character of the subject.

Yet when we met in London six months later (two years after our first meeting) and there was still no portrait, I was on the verge of giving up. Paul's subjects had changed and now he was concentrating on original compositions not based on old masters. Had he lost interest? I offered to come for another sitting if he needed one, but he declined. A few months after that Paul said he still intended to finish the piece, and promised to return to it after he had finished the work for his second one-man show at Houldsworth in June. He asked if I could come to the opening. I went. By time I arrived the London press had already published a very serious, glowing account of the new show based on preview visits. The opening was packed and noisy as openings are, but also reassuring as the artworks, some of them quite challenging, even grim, were selling, including a large, haunting $11,000 (£6,000 plus VAT) piece of a young girl in 18th Century dress. There amidst the admiring public, Paul told me my portrait was finished, and he would show it to me after the crowd had gone.

Then, after two and a half years, there it was. Entitled "Portrait with City View," it wasn't exactly the picture I had imagined, but something actually more than I had allowed myself to hope for. Through the window is a stunning view of Stockholm, my second home, to which Paul had traveled to capture the image. The crispness of the details (which unfortunately fail to reproduced in a jpeg) and the radiance of the light evoked comparisons to Canaletto and Ingres from onlookers, but undeniably the strongest influence was that of Paul himself, whose artistic insights admit one into a realm the key to which is possessed by him alone.

This, then, is the story of how I came to exist in an artwork by Paul Hodgson. It is art appreciation on a higher level. Collecting at its most satisfying. Gertrude Stein had Picasso, and I have Paul.

For more images click here

other articles by Gregory J. Peterson at artcritical:
Richard Estes
Damon Lehrer
Sarah McEneaney
Sonya Sklaroff

Gregory J. Peterson is a New York corporate lawyer who collects and lectures about contemporary realist painting.