After months of sheltering-in-place, working alone on a series of large scale oil paintings in her loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, one of the early hot spots of the Covid contagion, the Itinerant Portraitist, Brenda Zlamany ventured out into the world again, though as she noted, “a socially distanced one,” to paint watercolor portraits of 57 mask wearing subjects from direct observation at Glen Falls House, a historic hotel located in the Catskills town of Round Top, New York.
“My zip code in Williamsburg was the epicenter of the epicenter, but I stayed at home, deeply committed to Brooklyn, New York City, and my community of artists,” Brenda told me when I called her after seeing images of her wonderful new portraits of people in masks pop into my Facebook feed.
I met Brenda over a year ago, when she visited Sonoma County in California, following the Tubbs fire of 2017, as part of her Itinerant Portraitist project on the impact of climate change in America. Starting in 2018, she traveled to Sonoma, Key West, and Alaska, painting portraits and recording personal narratives from her subjects for future use in a documentary film that will accompany an exhibition of the paintings.
She describes this particular project on her web site: “I have recorded hundreds of personal narratives, including the dangers of whaling in a shorter season with less ice; being stuck in traffic with children while fleeing from hurricane Irma; the perils of driving a bus on the only road through Denali, where landslides resulting from melting permafrost are common; and how to pack chickens into pillowcases for a fast escape by car from a wildfire. I’ve also recorded conversations with scientists about ways to address the crisis, with realtors about the dangerous roles real estate plays, and with many others on the front lines, such as firefighters and politicians.”
The day she painted me, as I volunteered at Goatlandia near Santa Rosa, California, she included in my portrait a huge Red Waller pig, Henrietta, who lives at the non-profit animal rescue sanctuary. In her backpack, Brenda carried a camera lucida, a drawing device dating back to the Renaissance. As we sat for the session in Henrietta’s shed, I told her the story of the pig’s rescue from a fire pit.
Describing the Itinerant Portraitist as a “conceptual project that in some ways might walk a line between fine art and kitsch,” Brenda explained how something very special happens as the artist collaborates with her subjects. People participate in their portraits, watching Brenda work in her sketchbook that lays open flat, so that the subject can see the image as it emerges. Her subjects feel profoundly “seen” as they open up and talk about their experiences, which informs what Brenda creates. “It’s kind of like therapy, or confession,” Brenda noted.
The result of the session is a portrait, and in the Glen Falls House project, a limited edition print, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting local non-profit organizations. Brenda always takes digital photographs of her subjects holding their portraits. But it is the series of portraits that represent something much larger.
What struck me as unique about her particular Itinerant Portraitist “brand,” is that Brenda seeks out these personal narratives to make sense of complicated societal issues. She is doing what is perhaps, one of the most important undertakings of the artist. In the faces of everyday people, the firefighters, residents who lost their businesses and homes, local officials and community volunteers Brenda painted in Sonoma, or the people who came to Glen Falls House, she manages to convey both the trauma and the resilience of a community. I found and continue to find her work moving.
I stayed in touch with this unique visual storyteller, and now, a little over a year later, I was curious to hear how the Covid pandemic had impacted her decade long passion project, The Itinerant Portraitist. As we talked, another disastrous climate event was unfolding on the West Coast, with fires burning out of control throughout California. I told Brenda that sadly, I was no longer volunteering at Goatlandia due to Covid, but the non-profit was actively rescuing animals from the local fires.
When I asked Brenda what Covid time had been like for her, she told me, “At first I thought that we would all get Covid and die. At its peak in New York, 800 people were dying each day; the ambulances that passed our building all night kept us awake.” She went on to observe that the pandemic revealed that “there is definitely a caste system in the art world.” She explained, “There were those who could run, and those who stayed in part because they could not leave.” Brenda stayed put in her Brooklyn community, and ordered massive quantities of art supplies for the lockdown.
As I settled into the work of writing this new piece about her, I noticed another posting on Brenda’s Facebook page. It was a video she took on the rooftop of her loft, on September 11, 2001, as the World Trade Center Towers went up in flames. She’s holding Oona, her one-year old daughter, as she processes this distressing event with her artist friends, also on the roof. They watch a plume of smoke engulf the buildings, and the sense of a local community in crisis banding together is palpable. Brenda observed that interestingly, many artists left the city then, as well. It occurred to me that paradoxically, while Brenda frequently travels the world as The Itinerant Portraitist, she is deeply grounded in her own local community, one where people have experience pulling together to support each other in horrific times.
Before the COVID lockdown in mid-March, Jane Hart of Lemon Sky Projects, invited Brenda to do a residency at Glen Falls House, a historic hotel in the Catskills. The terms were never finalized, but the project was not grounded in a specific issue and would probably not have been part of The Itinerant Portraitist, which is as Brenda explained, “ an issue-driven project.” She describes it as, “a multi-year exploration of the constructive effects of portraiture in communities around the world.”
“The Glen Falls House temporarily closed and when it reopened, the Gallery where we were going to exhibit the portraits became a grab-and-go sandwich shop because the hotel’s restaurant had closed due to the Covid indoor dining ban,” she continued. The residency was put on hold and Brenda kept painting in her beloved Brooklyn.
Brenda incorporated a circus theme into her Covid lockdown artwork, using images of circus performers, in the tradition of Picasso, Goya, Toulouse Lautrec, Max Beckman, George Seurat, Watteau, and Calder, an apt metaphor for current times, and painted with joy and purpose, alone in her loft except for, Oona, whose college in Atlanta, Emory University, had sent its students home.
“I’ve been painting for myself,” Brenda reflected, “It’s like you don’t have a career. It’s just you. My daughter uses a term, FOMO– fear of missing out.” With no openings to attend, no museums and galleries to visit, Brenda also took a break from social media, resisting the constant urge to share, and she returned to her early solitary studio practice, conquering her own FOMO tendencies and perhaps, discovered a greater authenticity.
“You found your creative bubble,” I observed, acknowledging how powerful, absorbing, and restorative artistic work is in such a dire time in human history. When so much destruction surrounds us, creation is ultimately our best defense and salvation. I felt happy for Brenda that she had transformed her Covid lockdown into what she described as a magical time; still, I wondered what made her want to pursue the Glen Falls House residency, which by nature of the experience, seemed to me to defy the idea of social distancing. Her Itinerant Portraitist work, unlike her recent solitude, is socially immersive.
Brenda chronicled how as things gradually opened up around her and the Covid infection rate declined in the city, she cautiously re-emerged. “In April, I left my studio for the first time and drove past closed museums and galleries and boarded up shops. In May, I started walking with a few friends. Then I went to some BLM protests where people masked up. I saw that being outdoors with people wearing masks hadn’t spread the virus, so it felt less risky to go out. I did yoga in the park in small groups and had started to have a bit of a social life.”
Motivated by her curiosity about what the lives of the artists she knew who left the city to resettle in upstate New York looked like, and her own desire to resume The Itinerant Portraitist project, Brenda began to rethink how she could pursue the Glen Falls House residency.
Next, she had to figure out how to exhibit the finished portraits; she remembered that at a previous portrait performance event at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, she had hung her watercolors in plastic sleeves on a clothesline between two trees. She ordered more sleeves with the intent of finding an outdoor spot where they could be hung. Fortuitously, at Glen Falls House, there was an outdoor tent with cables near the ceiling, perfect for hanging the watercolors.
After arriving at the Catskills hotel, she immediately set up her outdoor studio and within an hour, started to paint her subjects, who arrived at their scheduled sessions wearing their required masks. I asked how this differed from her previous experience in Saudi Arabia, where she painted portraits of women in full hijabs.
“In Saudi Arabia, I learned that I had to pose my subject's eyes. Even though 2/3’s of their face was not visible,” Brenda recalled, "all the parts of the face are connected. While I cannot see what's going on below, the eyes change as the muscles in the face move to create different expressions. Sometimes I would need to say to someone, ‘would you please hold a smile for a minute, your eyes look sad and I do not think you are a sad person.’”
What she discovered as local workers, guests of the hotel, and artists who had fled the city to the upstate New York, participated in her Glen Falls House project, was this: “The men, women, and children from 6 to 70 years old, used their masks to make a statement.”
“I did not want to style them,” Brenda went on. Her subjects often showed up with several different masks and asked for advice. A conversation about what various patterns might signal eschewed. Most people, however, very deliberately chose masks they wore. They discussed fashion with Brenda and came sporting a variety of accessories. They requested that the artist make specific messages on their t-shirts, hats, and masks legible in the portraits.
“If there wasn’t Covid, and I had the whole face, I would not have focused so much on the props,” Brenda noted. “I can tell any story in a face, but with only the eyes, everything else has so much more meaning.”
One woman, a local artist who lives in a vast natural setting, wore a knife around her neck.
Brenda requested that another subject hold a chainsaw that he used for hotel grounds maintenance. An insistent subject asked Brenda to paint the rings she wore on every finger of her hands, as each one had significance to her. “These details became the psychological content of the portraits,” Brenda said.
When I asked if people talked more or less with their masks on, Brenda described her subjects as desperate to talk. “The Itinerant Portraitist is a conversation driven project, a collaboration between artist and subject,” Brenda said. “We are on a journey together; a person uses me to see how they are seen. The project is about communities discovering who they are.”
After months of social isolation, the people came to have their portraits done at Glen Falls House, hungry for connection. “They spoke about the narrative content of their clothing and jewelry more than they normally would, Brenda reported. “The sessions went on longer than usual. We kept talking as we covered everything about our lives.” Brenda found that she too needed to talk.
An emergency room doctor wearing a pink bandana reassured Brenda that in a second wave of the pandemic we won’t lose as many people because of better treatment options to replace intubating patients.
A woman and her young daughter proudly showed Brenda how they had dyed fabric and stitched the masks they made together as a fun lockdown activity.
A man wearing a multi-colored mask with fish on it and a black t-shirt that said, “THAT’S A HORRIBLE IDEA. What time?” told Brenda that he wore the shirt to send a funny message to his father, who is dying.
An illustrious former club owner/ local realtor and shop keeper covered in tattoos, showed up in a mask with a bright red mouth painted on it, with her blind incontinent dog. The dog during the session had a boner which Brenda documented in a portrait that made me laugh out loud. The conversation between Brenda and the woman ranged from boisterous to intimate. “She expressed concern about an upcoming trip she had scheduled to take her son to visit colleges,” Brenda recalled.
A masculine looking guy with a bright green buzzcut showed up in a pink children’s mask with Pandas on it, and told Brenda that he liked the contrast in his look. Another man in a blue rimmed visor wore a scarf mask with a drawing of a dinosaur on it. (I’m not sure what the significance of the dinosaur was, but extinction came to mind.)
Brenda didn’t recognize the very business-like woman who worked at the front desk whose portrait she had painted. Her face had been covered by a scarf, her cowboy hat, and glasses. When Brenda glimpsed the woman a few days later without her mask, “I said to her, ‘oh my god, is that you?’ She had such a beautiful face.” A few days into the residency, Brenda adjusted her session protocol, and asked her subjects if they could give her a quick peek of their features so that she could attempt to include the information hidden beneath the mask in the portrait.
Portrait number #3 that Brenda painted, is of a resident from the nearby town of Coxsackie, who had gone to college at Wesleyan with Brenda. The woman learned that Brenda was coming to Glen Falls House, and signed up for a portrait session. Over 30 years ago, the woman asked her parents to purchase Brenda’s Senior thesis exhibition artwork for her graduation present. The woman invited Brenda over for dinner at her home, where Brenda’s etchings hung on the walls. “A friendship that never happened, happened,” Brenda described.
“It was a bit of a shock to my system to do 57 portraits, after months of painting alone in my loft,” Brenda admitted. The event, attended by people who had come to the Catskills to vacation, or who lived and worked in the area, while sometimes challenging in the backdrop of the pandemic, proved successful on many levels.
As I scanned the series of masked faces Brenda painted at Glen Falls House, I realized how perfectly Brenda conveyed peoples’ desire to carry on with their lives. Her Itinerant Portraitist project, captures the zeitgeist of the moment. Brenda optimistically posited, as we concluded our conversation. “It may be a crisis that can fix things.”
Brenda hopes to show this collection of portraits back home in the New York City area; she recently applied for a grant for a project called The Itinerant Portraitist: Local Heroes. She’d like to do portraits and record the stories of essential workers in downtown Brooklyn. The Itinerant Portraitist, like many of us, misses her life of traveling from place to place. Her next exploration may very well take place close to home, as her journey continues.
I can hardly wait to hear about what she discovers, that is if I survive the West Coast fires, and the global pandemic, not to mention the results of the critical election this fall. I will take inspiration from people like Brenda, who make up my community of creative souls, determined to make things better.
All images are by Brenda Zlamany. Subjects are in order of appearance: Jonathan Picco, Sue Zemel and Henrietta, Minnie Keene, Portia Munson, Ray Ackerman, Genna Yarkin, Tiffany Fieldings, Ivy, Hugh Haggerty, Deb Parker, Flynn Brier, Dyllon Young, Shaheer, Jonathan Lerner, Greg Brier, Jacqueline Farrara, Gail Marowitz, and Brenda Zlamany
