You don’t get to paint many celebrity portraits from life if
your studio is the former bedroom of your one-bedroom apartment and you have to
go through the unkempt living room to get to it. But I did get to paint Margaret Harris there once.
Margaret was a trail-blazing black pianist, who began life
as one of those amazing child prodigies who roll out of the crib one morning
and start playing the piano. There is a
British Pathe newsreel from 1947 of her playing a Brahms lullaby at the age of
3.
When I painted her 42 years later, she was a powerfully
built, striking women with the countenance of an Abyssinian warrior queen, who
had achieved a number of notable successes in her career, including becoming
the first black woman to conduct such major orchestras as the Chicago Symphony
and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Margaret died of a heart attack at the very young age of 56
in 2000. In a March 23 obituary that
year in “The Los Angeles Times,” written by Myrna Oliver, it was recalled that Margaret
“played her first recital at age 3 in the Cary Temple Auditorium of her native Chicago.
Dressed in a white satin dress, with her favorite doll perched next to the baby
grand piano, she enthralled her audience as she played, from memory, 18 works
by Bach, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Brahms. She yawned at one point, but
never missed a note, and when the concert ended, she picked up her doll and ran
to her mother.” Margaret entered the
Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at
age 10 and by age 12 was in the Juilliard School of Music in New
York City, where she earned her bachelor's and
master's degrees.
The Times obit neatly summarized her many achievements, stating that Margaret “taught music, played solo recitals from London to New York to San Francisco, conducted the orchestras of 16 American cities and several ballet companies, and composed television scores, two piano concertos, two ballets and an opera.”
When I painted her, I had a strong feeling that, even with so many important achievements behind her, she was feeling a bit sad about life. She was very proud, though, of having been named Dame of Honor and Merit by the Knights of Malta a couple of years earlier. And she had some future plans regarding teaching and consulting work that came to fruition. Five years before her death, she went to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, at the invitation of the U.S. Information Service as cultural specialist for a production of "Porgy and Bess." And she was looking forward in a couple of months to a new position as associate dean of the Pennsylvania Academy of Music in Lancaster.
Margaret was living with her mother, her guiding light in her precocious early years, in a sprawling apartment complex on West End Avenue, just a short walk away from Juilliard and Lincoln Center. Most of the tenants were middle- and upper-middle class whites, and she said she and her mother felt somewhat ill-at-ease there from all the inquisitive looks they got from their neighbors. While I was painting her, she had a lot of interesting things to say about her life and the people she worked with in the music business.
The portrait sitting was arranged through a good friend, Don Learned, a New Hampshire native whose family went back to the Mayflower. An acquaintance used to call him “The Colonel,” because of his bearing and appearance. Don was one of the first courtroom sketch artists for television, put to work when he was in the graphics department of CBS-TV. He later freelanced doing comps and storyboards for the advertising industry and then started his own company supplying slides for TV news operations around the country.
Don met Margaret through a dating service, and they had a relationship for several years. He knew I loved to paint people and mentioned this to Margaret, who agreed to sit for me informally. I gave her the portrait in exchange.
My own natural light studio setup by the two adjacent windows in the room wasn’t suitable for a 30x36, so I turned things around to use the length of the room in order to back up to assess what I was doing. I painted the picture under the light from an old-fashioned, three-bulb ceiling fixture, which created a pretty nice light effect on Margaret, to be honest, even though I’m generally opposed to any use of artificial light. I did a couple of other fairly decent portraits under this light, as well, so what do I know.
Margaret chose to wear an elaborately designed, custom-made ceremonial gown laced with silver threads that was a bit tricky to paint, especially because of the rectangular shapes around the area of the bosom. When a friend saw it in progress, he said that area (he used a more precise term) looked “square.” I later did my best to make it less square, but never did succeed to my satisfaction, having to make adjustments after the fact. There you go again. Don’t give it away. Painters are not supposed to draw attention to troublesome parts of a painting when the work is done. Everybody knows that!
After the third sitting, I felt I had done as much as I was able to do. Margaret had posed beautifully throughout the ordeal. When she took a look at the finished product, she immediately burst into tears and gave me a big, warm hug. I teared up also. I wondered later if I had managed to capture just a bit of that shy little piano playing prodigy in this portrait of the strong, independent, accomplished woman that Margaret had grown up to be.
