Waiting for Hockney
Dear Mr. Hockney,
It is a great honor for me to have
the opportunity to write to you.
In the purest sense, I think
that you are world class.
Like yourself, I believe that a new
way of seeing is a new way of feeling,
and that the greatest art
reaches beyond the initiated.
The vehicle for the spirit of urgency and
intensity which occupies my being is drawing.
I worked standing up, using sharp instruments
while under twenty power magnification.
My portrait is of a human figure.
This portrait took eight years and five
months of full-time work to complete.
I finished at 4:
30 PM, January 2, 2003.And Dr. Gary Vikan, Brother Rene Sterner
and I would love to show it to you.
Respectfully yours,
Billy Pappas
Today is the sixth of
October, it's Wednesday...
and, I'm on my way up to New
York to see Lawrence Weschler.
He is a former twenty-year
veteran of The New Yorker.
He is also the director of the
Department of Humanities at NYU.
What's so good for me is that he is a close
friend, champion and collaborator with David Hockney.
He's my one and only goal
to get me to the next level.
I've got Marilyn in the trunk and...
...I'm on my way up
there to show it to him.
It all came about the time right
as I graduated from art school.
I was in my mid-twenties...
there were some ideas
I had about life...
and...
I was a waiter at a restaurant.
I had always been in
the restaurant business.
Busboy.
Bartender.
People who've gone to art school,
what are they doing now?
I didn't want to wake up one day
and be well into middle age and say,
"I wonder what would have happened if
I had done what I thought I could do?"
I knew that I had to change from what I
was doing, but I wasn't sure exactly how.
I'm Dr. Lifestyle, Larry Link.
Actually, Lawrence J. Link, please.
I'm an architect, I think.
Actually, advisor to people.
I deal in fantasy.
I feel like I come kind of obliquely from
another place, not really the art world.
I know more about nature,
I know more about music,
than I do about perhaps
the history of what I do.
I needed someone to kind of cross my path,
and just take their finger and just give me
a good hard poke right below my throat.
Accident? Fate? Karma? Kismet?
Grand intent design, everything was
pre-planned, it was ordained by the stars!
This man, I thought, was clearly insane.
Sorry about that.
But, I liked where we were going.
I mean, he's my guy.
OK, fast rewind. Balaloop.
He was a waiter in a restaurant, and
he asked me what I wanted for dinner.
I found out he was an artist, a fine artist, which
is the way I was trained, as a fine architect.
I was like, "Hi, you do
things with pencil. Wonderful."
So we started a dialogue, we started to talk,
we started to say, "Let's have lunch." No.
OK. Take two. Click.
We would have these coffee sessions
and we would be scheming,
What's the state of the
art? Well, photography?
Digital photography?
Sometimes his ideas were bigger than
mine. I thought, "Oh, that's cool."
I didn't think of that.
Wouldn't you want to just make
something that couldn't be reproduced?
He would dare me, he would one-up me.
Why don't we make reality
better than reality?
I thought, OK, I always was
really good at getting likenesses.
I mean, that's something that not
everyone can do well. I can do it well.
Billy, you're going to do a portrait.
It's going to set the
art world on its ear.
I need a mission, and
I had one, with this.
We're doing the next major
art movement in America.
When Pete Townsend was
first starting his band,
he asked this fellow Jim Marshall
He said, "Here, I designed this. It's much
louder. It's the loudest thing I've ever designed."
So, he listens to it.
He's like, "How is it?"
He said, "It's perfect."
"Except, I want it ten times louder."
"I want it to sound like a machine gun. I
want to hurt people. You know, that loud."
And that's kind of where
my head was with drawing.
I wanted to make a portrait that has
the attention-commanding capability
of a bombastic live performance.
I wanted to do something unprecedented,
to prove how much more
there is to see and describe.
Precision.
It was in my mind to make
DaVinci, and Ingres, and Durer say,
"Holy Sh*t! You drew that?"
I wanted to make a f***ing traffic-stopping
portrait that hit you like a punch.
I was thinking about
taking a very famous person
and trying to bring that famous face
something it couldn't otherwise have.
So, we're throwing around the names
of all these famous, famous people:
Elvis Presley.
Jack Nicholson.
Doris Day.
Fred Astaire.
Jimi Hendrix.
Liz Taylor.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe?
Well, she'll live probably
forever in everybody's mind.
Fabulous. The ultimate.
I found this picture of Marilyn.
I loved the photograph of Marilyn.
I was attracted to the fact that it was
blurry, it was out of focus. It was detached.
doesn't have. I can do better.
He pointed to the photograph
and looked up at me and he said,
"Can you bring that..."
"...THIS?"
This isn't in the dictionary.
"Can you bring this..."
"...presence."
At that moment, when you
said that, that was it.
The game was on.
I've gone over this short list
of things like fifty times, but...
...it's always something.
This is fine.
OK?
OK. All set?
Yep, I'm ready to go.
Around 2:
30, I expectto get down to NYU.
Then, I expect to meet Mr.
Weschler around quarter to four.
I have exhibited once
before in New York,
I exhibited at the
Society of Illustrators.
at Society of Illustrators,
them and give them confidence
making it as an illustrator.
I exhibited at both of these shows and
basically concluded I
couldn't draw that well.
Some people call New York
the epicenter of the art world.
I've spent the last seven
as far removed from New York, it's the chicken
capital of the world where I live, you know.
It's the place where the man and the lady in Grant
Wood's 'American Gothic' painting really live.
Let's go to my office,
my place of employment.
This is, this is my studio.
I've always loved the windows. Every night,
the sunsets here are either a 9 or a 10.
Here, I... these are all just photos
of Marilyn that I would, would find helpful.
So I'd have, you know, neck
photos, nose photos, profile photos.
Then I went from the photos and
staged models to look like her.
I wanted to make it look as if she sat inches
away from me, giving me her complete cooperation.
To make her as alive as
she's been since she died.
Cause that's life drawing.
But how do you do that?
When you're going through the academic
experience of learning to draw the figure,
you become, sort of,
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