If called upon, Katherine Potter can create a painting that looks like a photo. But, she says, that’s a parlor trick.
“You might as well take a picture,” she says. “The goal is to convey the subject and express yourself. The artist has to be present in the painting.”
Potter finds it more interesting to turn photos into portraits that will never be mistaken for camera shots. A freelance illustrator and graphic designer for 25 years, she’s now semi-retired. For the past decade, she’s been painting portraits in oil.
“There’s nothing more interesting to paint than the human face,” she says. Potter searched the internet for less-familiar photos of rock stars before rendering a pudgy Jimi Hendrix. In another portrait, Jimmy Page leans on his left elbow.
Johnny Rotten’s visage differs from his typical public image. “Usually, when you see him, he’s like a wife-beater and all messed up,” Potter says. “Here, it looks like he’s going to the prom.”
She also uses family members and acquaintances as subjects and is particularly proud of capturing the phone held by a young man named Tommy.
“I liked the angle, his position and the way that the smoke curls from the joint, but I find reflective hard metal surfaces to be challenging,” she says. “I did capture that highlight on the end [a light reflected in the phone’s corner] and got the screen down pretty well.”
To drum up business and explore other personalities, Potter tried social media, but disliked it. Then, she placed flyers and stickers around town advertising her portraiture services but only one person called.
“I figure people think, ‘Does that mean I have to sit in some stranger’s house?’ ” she says. “And also, ‘It must be expensive.’ But by following some vague guidelines, I came up with $500 for an 18-by-24 frame.”
Potter lived in Washington Heights for years before relocating to Iowa City to be with her daughter during the pandemic. “I had a portable job and Manhattan was like a morgue. It was creepy.”
After her Midwest sojourn, she planned to move to Harlem but drove through Beacon while visiting family in Garrison last year and decided to forgo the big city.
“I’m not usually this impulsive, but my brain did a 180,” she recalls. “It’s a cool thing to have that kind of freedom. I was like, ‘Whee!’ ”
Potter has since shown her work at The Yard and met people through her hound, Fern.
“I’m so relaxed — it’s way different than my 20s or 30s,” she says. “I’ll never be the star of the talent show and have no driving ambition. I’m just trying to please myself, not a client or judges at a particular show.”
Earlier in her career, Potter designed newspaper ads and worked in the children’s book industry, writing and illustrating two titles for Simon & Schuster (Spike and My Mother the Cat). Instead of a photo for the dust flaps, she drew self-portraits.
“I’m impressed by artists who can talk or write about their work in smart, esoteric ways,” she says. “But that’s not me. I’m always going for a feeling first.”
The “softer, rounder” style she used for the children’s book illustrations informs her portraits, though her daughter’s hard edges step forth in the work titled “Tween,” where anger and attitude boil over. With head cocked and hip protruding, the kid looks like she’s getting ready to ball her fingers into fists and mix it up.
“Really, it’s, ‘Come on, take the picture already,’ ” says her mother. “She’s still like that, but deservedly so.”
Though Potter eventually grew jaded in the children’s book world, she invokes Picasso’s observation that it took him “four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
She, too, is “trying to enter the zone when things are going well, and you’re on autopilot. Like with the phone [in “Tommy”]. I stepped back and thought, ‘Wow, I did the phone.’ I was so happy.”
For more of Potter’s work, see katherinepotter.com.
