Little Marcel Proust Portrait

Description

Little Marcel Proust Portrait

• acrylic on archival watercolor paper, 2011
• signed on reverse (will sign on front at your request)
• 11″ x 14″, unframed
• artwork ships in a protective sleeve and is flat-packed by hand to prevent folding and curling

I made this portrait of Marcel Proust as a boy by looking at a variety of reference images and then creating a composite likeness from all of those sources. I make each portrait by hand, using my four-color stencil process, separating the image into a series of eight stencils then airbrushing each color from light to dark.

À la recherche du temps perdu is the one great literary epic that I’ve made it through. When I began it in my early 20s, the translation I was reading was called Remebrance of Things Past, which sounds pretty sentimental compared to In Search of Lost Time, which is the translation I picked up in my early 30s and spent at least a year reading.

So, for this artwork, I went in search of little boy Marcel as we read about him in the early parts of the story, when he spends a lot of time alone or with Francoise and begins his obsession with the Duchesse de Guermantes.