Archive Sunday – Bruce Hall, 1972

by Marty Coleman | Jul 18, 2010 | Sketchbook History Tour | 2 comments

Remember last week I mentioned I had counted up my sketchbooks and I found I had 29 of them? I decided to to through them and pick out one per year to post on Sundays for a while.  This is from the first sketchbook (1971-1973).  I was 17 when I painted this, my junior year of high school. 

This portrait is of a family friend, Bruce Hall.  We moved to Darien, CT because of his mother, Helene.  My mother met her in a grocery store in Maryland in the 50s.  Over 15 years later, when we were going to move to the east coast from the west, we focused our home search in the same town where Helene lived.


I don’t remember any of the specifics of why I was doing this portrait of Bruce, but I suspect Helene was encouraging me to do it. She was a great artist, working in painting and sculpture. She was the second major influence on me as an artist, after my grandfather, who had passed away by this time.  She encouraged me and pushed me to understand what being an artist was really all about. 


Helene was a brassy, ballsy broad in the classic definition (think Rosalind Russell in Mame). She took no prisoners when she saw pretention or hypocrisy. She was funny as hell. All obvious reasons why my mother and she became friends from a simple grocery store encounter. How I would have liked to have been in that aisle when they met, I can just imagine how funny they were and how they caught each other’s attention as a result.


She once challenged me to try to create something as good as a Picasso sculpture I saw at the Museum of Modern Art on a visit there with her.  I said the typical ‘Anyone could do that’ and she stopped me in my tracks and said, then do it.  I actually did attempt to create a wire sculpture (this was when I was about 13) and failed miserably.  The lesson was learned.  It wasn’t a question of IF you could do it. It was a question of DO YOU DO IT.  When it gets to that question the bigger question arises. WHY are you doing it.  And that changes you from being a critic to being an artist.


Helene is now 91 or so. She is taken care of by Bruce and his son, Evan.  Both great guys!