A few readers (and power-Googlers, I suspect) have written in for more information about The Eyes of Don Bachardy, currently being shown at the AFI Festival in Los Angeles. The film is a short documentary featuring (intense) artist Don Bachardy painting a portrait of…me.
I always liked sitting for Bachardy because he wouldn’t say a word to me for six hours or seven hours while he was working, but afterwards he warmly showed me old portraits of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill or Marianne Moore even. And—Christopher Isherwood, whom Bachardy painted on his deathbed. While Isherwood was dead.
Bachardy also has a private art collection made up of knickknacks he’s traded with other artists, which is why the bitchin little painting over the sink, if you ask, turns out to be by David Hockney maybe, and the bitchin little sculpture on the coffee table, if you ask, turns out to be by Frank Stella maybe, and I could never manage to pretend that I didn’t find his vivid, name-dropping rooms just thoroughly fucking cool.
Of all the times I sat for him, I think he liked the session that ended up in “The Eyes of Don Bachardy” least. He felt he had to paint “big” for the camera, and the camera itself seemed to throw off his absurdly stop-action gaze. Me, I didn’t like the session too much either because my eyes kept watering. It’s hard to stay unmoving and focused for 100-plus minutes while the setting sun sends strong glints off the Pacific Ocean and off its dolphins, directly into your documented face.