HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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Artist Captures Fame With Brush and Oils |
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In his artistic career, portraitist Kenneth Hari has rubbed elbows with many people who exist in the quicksilver flare of celebrity. Not all of his subjects have been famous, but the list of notables whose likeness Hari has captured on canvas reads like a "Who's Who" of diverse disciplines. Dustin Hoffman, Angela Lansbury and James Michener have posed for him, as have cellist Pablo Casals, soccer great Pele, and artist Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali. Classical guitarist Andres Segovia practiced as Hari sketched, loose-limbed mime Marcel Marceau remained motionless for him, and writer Katherine Anne Porter sat for 22 different portraits in a week. Hari frequently creates multiple oil paintings of a subject that explore facets of each unique personality. "It's the spirit I'm trying to get, and it's difficult," the artist said. "I pry and ask a lot of questions, but I keep the answers that they give me to myself. I don't sell them to the National Enquirer. Those go into me and then come out in the painting, somehow." He admits people in the vanguard of their respective professions attract him. A recent sitter was Jeremy Irons, currently the toast of Broadway in "The Real Thing." "He's very introverted, I think," Hari said of the British "Brideshead Revisited" star. "He's very low key and a nice person - very relaxing - and a friendship has started." The busy artist, who seems a study in perpetual motion, has never been shy about ringing up prominent people and asking them to sit for him. In the late '60s, the painter was so inspired by W.H. Auden's "Age of Anxiety" that he telephoned the English poet at his New York home. A first meeting evolved into a friendship and a series of Auden portraits. Many of the late poet's friends became Hari's patrons. Hari, who has been painting since he could hold a brush, got his first commission at age 12 when a local man asked him to do a portrait of billiards champion Willie Mosconi. "I went to "Who's Who" in the library and found out Willie Mosconi was alive and living in Haddon Heights, so I called him." Hari recalled. "My father drove me down, Mr. Mosconi sat, and he was terrific to me." Hari attended the Newark School for Fine and Industrial Arts and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute of Johns Hopkins University. As a teenager he spent summers traveling to California, where his older brother Ron attended college. Hari persuaded celebrities like Gene Kelly and Groucho Marx to sit for portraits during those Los Angeles vacations. Later he resided in Paris, where he painted the premier dancer for the Paris Opera Ballet in the same studio where Degas produced his famous studies of ballet dancers. During this same period the artist regularly commuted to London, where he executed a portrait of a British politician. Hari was already commissioned to do a portrait of Paul Robeson, the American actor, singer and scholar, when Robeson died. Since he had never met Robeson, the artist based his portrait on impressions he got from conversations with Paul Robeson Jr., actor James Earl Jones, who was starring in a play on Robeson at the time, and others who had known the man. The resulting four-by-eight-foot painting hangs at the Robeson Student Center at Rutgers in Newark. Asked which painting Hari feels is his best, the artist replies, "The next one." Noted people now call him for a portrait, and his work is included in the permanent collections of 156 museums around the world. Hari lives simply, though, occupying an apartment on the second floor of his family home here. He also maintains a Manhattan studio. His plans include publication of a book of his paintings of world-famous people, "which will be proof of what I've done and things that have gone into museums, and will say that I've been on the earth," he said. One canvas the portraitist recently completed seems a visual metaphor for his own life. In it a figure in whiteface - a Brazilian carnival reveler - is pictured against a vista of ocean and sky. "I look at the carnival, the laughter," said Hari. "I have to live like the people in Rio de Janeiro do for that one week of the year so that I can go on and do the whole year. "Maybe it's looking at life through rose-colored glasses, but I think we all need that." |
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