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Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Here's one of my recent portaits of a husband-wife team at work. Robert Venturi is an architect and Denise Scott Brown is an urban planner. Together they have designed many major (and often controversial) buildings in various countries and have written many books on their ideas.
I began this portrait by observing them at work, in their conference room, which seemed to be the best setting for a portrait. The walls are covered with posters of their projects. One of their major themes is finding beauty in ordinary, even tacky, architecture like gas stations and MacDonald's twin arches. You can see why their ideas are controversial. The title of one of their books, Complexity and Contradiction, kept coming to mind, and I decided to make that the theme of the painting.
I sketched them on two occasions, once while they met with their office manager and once while they were being interviewed. Both times, I noticed that Bob usually wrote notes on a yellow pad while Denise did most of the talking. Once in a while he interjected a comment. I checked this out with them, and they agreed this was characteristic of their dynamic. They also wanted to be seated at the table.
Denise has spent a significant part of her career striving to be recognized as Bob's equal partner, and this is an issue that also concerns Bob, so I thought about a way to arrange them in the composition so that they had equal billing, so to speak. Bob is slightly forward, but more to the side, while Denise is back farther but more toward the center.
I set up a couple of appointments for doing oil sketches, but each timer they turned out to be too busy to sit still for an hour, so I finally decided to go ahead and photograph them. This has been happening a lot to me lately with very busy/famous people--I guess I need to learn how to be more assertive! But I made lots of color notes and they were very helpful.
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