And, Obama joked at the unveiling Wednesday, sans tan suit.
“We’re not looking for a gestural moment,” McCurdy said in a recent interview with the White House Historical Association, which acquires and funds official portraits of presidents and first ladies. “We’re looking for a more meditative or transcendent moment.”
Dressed in a black suit, white shirt and light gray tie with his hands in his pockets, Obama looks from the canvas at the viewer with an enigmatic expression. Nothing else alters the composition.
“What I love about Robert’s work is that he paints people exactly as they are, for better or for worse. He captures every wrinkle on your face, every fold in your shirt,” Obama said during Wednesday’s ceremony. “You’ll notice that she refused to hide any of my gray hair. She refused my request to make my ears smaller. She also talked me out of wearing a tan dress, by the way.”
“It looks like you’re face to face, forming a connection,” Obama continued. “I liked that, partly because presidents often rub off on the air. They even take on a mythical status, especially after you’re gone, and people forget all the things they didn’t like about you “.
After taking the initial photo that McCurdy painted, the former president had no say in the final portrait, according to the artist.
“It’s part of my process that the singer can’t say anything about how the painting looks. They’re completely out of the process,” he said. “He was open to it and accepting of that process, so he never saw the footage we worked with.”
Former first lady Michelle Obama stayed true to her final portrait after posing for photos with her portraitist, New York artist Sharon Sprung, at the White House.
“I felt that confidence coming from her, that you do your thing, I do mine, I’ll trust you with yours, and I think the portrait works better sometimes that way. That she didn’t bring much else to present. -se,” Sprung told the historical association.
Like her husband’s, Michelle Obama’s portrait is painted in a distinctive style that breaks the mold of more traditional portraits hanging in the White House. Wearing an off-the-shoulder powder blue gown designed by Jason Wu, she sits on a couch in the Red Room of the White House, posing against a terracotta backdrop. Like the former president, she looks directly out of the frame at the viewer.
“Your work is phenomenal, but it was your essence, your soul, the way you saw me, the way we interacted, and it shows in this beautiful work,” Michelle Obama said during the inauguration ceremony.
The paintings are historic in another way: they capture the first black president and first lady.
“They seem to look different. But I don’t think it needs to be explained to people either. I think people seem to get it,” McCurdy said.
When the Obamas selected artists for earlier portraits hanging at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, they selected black painters — Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald — who were still emerging in the field at the time.
The painters behind the official White House portraits are both established artists. McCurdy, whose signature is hyper-photorealistic paintings on white backgrounds, has painted Jeff Bezos, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, among others.
Sprung has had a long career in figurative painting, including paintings for Congress, and has a connection to past White House portraits: When he was younger, he developed an artistic relationship with Aaron Shikler, who painted iconic portraits of the White House of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan.
“I don’t want it to look like it was done in 2013, or whatever. I want it to look like it was done at this time and place,” Sprung said in a video with the White House Historical Association.
The artist selection process began when the Obamas were still in the White House, including in-person interviews in the Oval Office. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, sat in on Sprung’s interview with the couple.
Then-President Obama and McCurdy discussed the painting process, including releasing control of the final product to the artist and the connection between the viewer and the subject he intends in each of his paintings.
“I think that openness really appealed to him,” McCurdy said.
When Sprung visited the Oval Office during the Obamas’ stay in the White House for a conversation about the portrait, she brought with her some preliminary sketches of the then-first lady to give the couple an idea of her direction.
“He picked a couple that he liked, and she picked a couple that she liked, who were very different in mood. And I found that really fascinating, but it gave me an insight into both of them,” Sprung said.
McCurdy begins his process by taking about 100 photographs of his subject against a white background. After selecting just one to paint, the rest of the images are destroyed and a 12-18 month painting process begins.
All Obama had to do, McCurdy said, was stick to his mark and not budge.
“He did an excellent job,” McCurdy said. The former president was “charming” and “very present”, he said.
When Sprung arrived at the White House to sit down with Michelle Obama, he decided to leave his paintings behind — “I didn’t want to leave my mark” — but instead photographed her and chatted while the Obamas’ dogs barked. the lawn
“I had them move the furniture from the red room to the blue room because the light was better,” he explained in an interview with the White House Historical Association.
Sprung is shorter than Michelle Obama; his initial plan to paint the First Lady standing, similar to the official portraits of Jaqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, ended up changing when he realized he was looking at her instead of at her level.
“I was going to do it standing up to give her some dignity, but she doesn’t need dignity. She has so much dignity that I decided to do it sitting down,” Sprung said.
As McCurdy worked on his portrait of President Obama, it became a challenge to keep the project a secret. He does not work with assistants, but those who helped print the photographs or entered his studio were sworn to secrecy.
Nor did he have any more meetings with the former president. Instead, over the course of the 18-month painting process, the subject became less of a person and more of a project.
“They become after a year, a year and a half, it becomes more of an object in a way, like a technical matter. I don’t feel like I really know them while I’m working with them on the canvas,” he said. .
For Sprung, the portrait of Michelle Obama was the longest he had ever worked on a painting: eight months.
“I worked on it day and night. And I said good morning to him, and I said good night to him,” he said. The most difficult detail, Sprung said, was not on her face or her hands or any part of her body, but her dress.
McCurdy’s challenge was to create a moment “where there is no time,” he said.
“There is no before, there is no after. As if that moment is the same in a long, as if a bell keeps ringing. And it’s a way to close the viewer in the moment,” he said.