Do you get inspired by seeing photo exhibits? I get so turned on I can hardly stand it! On Sunday morning I saw an exhibit that fired me up big time. "In th Company of Artists: Photographs from the Detroit Institute of Arts Collection" is all about portraits, both self and other. The description on the DIA web site says:

Through the photographs of André Kertész, Man Ray, Yousuf Karsh, Arnold Newman and Robert Mapplethorpe discover the lives of famous creative individuals. In the Company of Artists brings together portraits of artists, their families, friends, and surroundings along with writers and musicians and other individuals from artistic and bohemian circles from the late 1890s to present day.

Imagine seeing a candid portrait of Diane Arbus shooting photos at a "love-in" in Central Park, 1969. Or a self portrait of Larry Fink with his young daughter Molly in 1982. Andy Warhol wrapped in a towel wearing a wig and luscious make-up with his ubiquitous tape-recorder sitting in his lap. Yousuf Karsh's darkly haunting portrait of Giacometti surrounded by his elongated sculptures, a photo that was taken just weeks before his death. There must have been over 70 photos in this exhibit, all but two in black & white. Oh my, I salivate over gelatin silver prints! The deep tones. The burnished grain. The subtle contrasts. Yum!!!

So when I got home I called my friend Pat to ask if she could come over yesterday (Monday) to help me take self portraits in front of some of my paintings. We have a wonderful relationship that includes my paying her by the hour to assist me in whatever needs to be done. This time it meant finding and pulling out the specific paintings I had in mind, a tough job since I have hundreds of large watercolor paintings stacked in my art closet. And, of course, the ones I wanted were at the very bottom of the piles! Pat then helped me prop the paintings on top of Ed's mother's hope chest behind me, and brought my tripod upstairs to my studio and set it up at the proper height. As I posed, I used my cordless shutter release to take the pictures. This project took almost two hours, and the photo you see here was one of my favorites. The painting is from the years when I was a runner. It showed the route--abstractly, of course-- that I ran during the 1979 and 1980 Detroit/Windsor International Marathons.