Almost 35 years later, another stumbling—this time in his studio in Brooksville—again changed the course of his creative life, in which he had built a career around a voice he says was “offbeat and curious and annoyed a lot of people.” Born of a need to value the truths upon which this country was founded, and as a response to the invasion of Iraq, Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth series was intended to be a collection of 50 portraits of Americans without whom this country would be a very different place, a collection that he will ultimately give away.
He is currently working on his 94th portrait, 50 of which have been published in the book Americans Who Tell the Truth (Dutton, 2005), and he hasn’t sold one portrait—and won’t
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So was that summer of 1967 in Europe the turning point for you as an artist?
I wasn’t even an “artist” yet. That trip created a relationship with art I’d never imagined. I had been writing, all adolescent angst stuff. But after that trip I started drawing. And I had to look at the world. Just look at it—look at the surface and don’t think about anything else. It gave me this wonderful period of time where I could escape from all the stuff that was going on inside me.
So you came home and started drawing. Did you immediately like the work you created?
Absolutely, but not because I was good. I wasn’t. My eye just wasn’t good enough to realize how bad I was, which was great. I think a lot of people starting out can see they’re not good, and that frustrates them. I just kept copying Durer and Michelangelo, Leonardo, Degas, Picasso. I kept looking, and drawing. And then five or six years later, I had this vocabulary of marks in me about how to represent things that enabled me to look at what was inside and see the ambiguities, see the humor, see the darkness, and I could try to put it all in there.
You’re referring to your work before the Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits?
Yes, that work was all about surrealism and introspection.
You worked in series then also. [Shetterly’s series work includes the William Blake Proverbs of Hell of 70 paintings, the Annunciation series of 50, and his recent Collateral Damage series.] What compels you to work in series?
It’s a process. If you really look at something, either interior or exterior, you think and you feel. The great masters created pages of studies, looking at something—their own hand, a flower, an animal’s nose. I wanted to do the same thing with ideas. Look at an idea, and then turn it a little bit and look at it again. Look at it through a lens of anger, a lens of certainty, a lens of sadness.
You’d never been a painter of portraits, yet you took on this huge project. Why?
I assume that every artist wants to be relevant. You want to be relevant to the history of art, but you also want to be honest and say something about your moment because it often seems that by being the most relevant to your moment is how you actually take your place in the longer history. When the rhetoric began about the necessity to attack Iraq, I thought it was an outrage. I knew I had to respond in some way.
And you knew it was through portraits?
No, all I knew was that the way I usually paint with all its ambiguity would not matter at all. No one would pay attention. I needed a voice that was clear and unambiguous, and it had to be positive. It had to offer people a refuge, and it had to offer hope—and hope through action. I was distressed and in my studio. I looked up, and like so many artists, I have things all over my walls. There was a quote from Walt Whitman about this-is-what-you-should-do. It was about how to live in the world—a great statement of essential democracy, that everything on this earth matters. We have to honor that and if we don’t, nothing else matters.
So Whitman became the portal.
Exactly. One day out of complete frustration, I said I’ll paint Walt Whitman’s portrait and I’ll scratch his words into it, and damn it, if I won’t feel better.
And you did.
I suddenly felt connected to a kind of strength that was what was underneath the best ideals of this country.
How have you selected the people you paint?
It’s been an enormous learning curve. My background is not history or biography. Although I’ve always been political, I didn’t have the body of knowledge I needed to do this. And now I’m like a conductor. There’s a huge orchestra out there that needs to be recruited.
Rarely do images and words mate so inextricably on canvas. Did you recognize the power they had right away?
After I did the first one, I realized the effect. When somebody in a painting is looking right at you and then tells you what they are thinking, it stops people in a way that a solitary portrait can’t. I wanted them to reach out and . . .
[our voices join] . . . grab you by the throat.
I needed to find an approach that used the best of my ability as a painter, but also my passion as a citizen to say, “This is really important what is happening right now and we’ve got to be acting differently than we are, all of us, and what I actually wanted to do was paint so well, in fact, that you don’t even notice me. This isn’t about me. It’s about these people and what they have to say. You don’t think about the artist when you think about Mother Jones, think about Wendell Berry, think about Sojourner Truth. I am just the medium. Each piece of art has to be reconfigured and made real by your collaboration with your own experience, your own imagination.
Is an artist’s role as a truth teller different from someone else’s?
Each of us has an obligation to perform the best we can, as honestly as we can, to earn trust, and to contribute to the well-being of the community, and as artists I think we have a very special responsibility to tell a particular kind of truth. Art makes absolutely no sense at any level in any medium without something true about it. Otherwise, it has no value as art, at all. To me, there’s nothing in this about partisanship. I could care less about Republicans or Democrats. What I care about
is ideals.
Lots of people would call this work political. How do you see it?
To me, it’s about humanity; it’s about justice, about social and economic equality; it’s about survival of the species. It has to be political because that’s how things change.
