HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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HEADLINES FROM AROUND THE WORLD |
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Kenneth Hari Paints People You've Heard Of |
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Kenneth Hari didn't become a $200,000-a-year portrait painter at the age of 30 by being shy. When he was 12 and known in his Perth Amboy neighborhood for his precocious artistic talents, a neighbor asked him to do a painting of Willie Mosconi, working from photos and memory, as a surprise gift to the billiard champion. Hari said sure, accepting his first paid commission. Then he proceeded to phone Mosconi and set up a sitting for the portrait while electing a promise from Mosconi to go along with the surprise. When he was in his teens, Hari started going door-to-door asking, "Anybody want to buy a painting?" By the time his college years had rolled around he had upgraded the doors he was knocking on from those in Jersey to the carved eight-footers in Beverly Hills, where he visited his brother, a student in Los Angeles, during the summers. He met Gene Kelly that way - and painted his portrait as well as that of Groucho Marx and similar celebrities. Their names flow from Kenneth Hari's lips as unselfconsciously as Don Juan listing his conquest. "That's exactly what my friend Kurt - Kurt Vonnegut... the writer? - said to me one time," he says in a causal phone conversation with a reporter seeking an interview. And in a first time meeting face-to-face, the VIP listing of former Hari clients continues. There is Angela Lansbury, Henry Mancini, Melvin Belli, James Michener, C.P. Snow and Pablo Casals, who paid him the highest fee he's ever commanded at $65,000 for a portrait that took two year's worth of sittings. And there is Christopher Isherwood, who served as his personal patron for a year, paying him $500 a week and introducing him to any number of talented and famous whose photos - with Hari by their side - hang from the walls of his modest Perth Amboy second-floor home. The Isherwood relationship is another example of Hari's daring, his hustle, or what might best be described simply as his chutzpah. Hari had studied painting at both the Newark School of Fine Arts and Industrial Arts and the Maryland Institute, where he received his degree in 1968. But it was shortly thereafter that Hari describes himself as "walking along 57th Street in New York after coming out of a bookstore when the name W.H. Auden just kept coming in to my head. I went over to a telephone and asked if Auden was listed in Manhattan, I called and told him I'd like to do his portrait. That started it." Some of the exact details of Hari's meetings with the great and near-great are a bit hazy. He says he encountered Casal's wife Martita at a concert, but doesn't recall exactly how the introduction came about, possibly through a friend, he thinks, who knew her. Similarly - and he is quick to give good luck its due in the circumstances of his success - Hari was invited by a sculptor friend to an unveiling of a statue in 1974, at which he just happened to meet Preston Fraser. "You know," he explains..."From Kaiser-Fraser aluminum? I was just standing alongside of him and we started talking. He's from Nashville - they have society down there, you know? Maxwell House coffee and people like that - and he said he was going to write about me to a friend of his whose insurance company owns Grand Ole Opry." The upshot was what remains one of Hari's biggest accounts - a commission to do the portraits each year of the George D. Hay Award recipients, an honor bestowed in memory of the Opry's founder to outstanding contributors to country music. So far Hari has completed Opry commissions of country-western performers such as Hank Williams, Chet Akins and Minnie Pearl. Hari travels to Nashville with a dozen pieces of luggage containing brushes, pigment and lights and says that besides that account, his other out-of-town commissions rarely find him in Perth Amboy more than a month a year. Yet it's intimate atmosphere - decorated with crocheted pillows and a free-form orange afghan made for Hari by his girlfriend and agent, Gloria Migionici - looks remarkably lived in, even cosy. Pigments sit in used yogurt cups around the kitchen. There is a huge easel with a work in progress, a portrait of pianist Alexander Weissenberg. One finished portrait of Weissenberg hung recently in Princeton's McCarter Theatre when the pianist performed there. And Miglionici, who is as aggressive in Hari's behave as he used to be when he was selling himself alone, has arranged for his likeness to hang in a gallery in Bulgaria, the pianist's homeland. It is not the only noteworthy gallery where Hari's work appears. A lithograph, "The Prophet," may be viewed in the New Jersey State Museum. One of its original 500 pressings was bought by a patron whose name Hari won't reveal, but who arranged to have it hung in the new American artists' wing of the Vatican. Hari still talks, three years later, of a visit from a Count Bini of Florence who spoke to him then of someday painting the Pope. The urge to paint took over Hari's life "about the time I could walk," he says. Although neither of his parents was particularly artistic; his father was a drummer with a five-piece combo and used to hang around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He refuses to call himself a great painter, but says his work and exhibitions have never received a bad review. "If I had no talent why would 125 intelligent people on this earth have gladly posed for me? Why would they have taken the time? I'm not expounding some great art thats going to take over the earth, but I rarely experience self-doubt. I don't become dissatisfied because if it isn't going well I start over and do my best until it's right." Although Hari will identify admired painters such as Michelangelo, Verneer and Whistler, he says no artist has ever really influenced his naturalistic, or as he prefers to call "romantic" style of painting. "I like what Duke Ellington said," he comments on that subject. He said, "I don't look at other people's work because it might influence me, not that you don't respect other people's work, but you have to find your own way." For awhile that way consisted of a lot of portrait sized black and white drawings. Then came the celebrity portraits. Now Hari, who has painted dozens of portraits of friend Gloria in variety of poses, says he experimenting with "white face, mime, something that I got interested in when I painted Marcel Marceau." A painting of Gloria in white-face makeup is displayed among a dozen others over his living-room couch. "White-face exacts a kind of great psychological study," Hari says. "I've really given up the chase after the portrait, even though the work is coming more and more. Today he says it takes at least the $200,000 a year he is making now to keep going, what with travel, supplies, phone bills and the endless and inevitable promotion. There are color slides to be made of every portrait, reprints of newspaper stories to be sent out to newspapers and prospective clients, list of quotes from celebrities to introduce Hari to those who may not yet have heard of him, including comments that range from Henry Kissinger praising the Casals portrait to a billet-doux from the late Adelle Davis. These days Glori Miglionici, the dark-haired, quiet-spoken former designer who met Hari in a shopping center when he asked her to pose for him, does almost all of that work. While Hari refuses to commit himself on his talents, Gloria says there is no doubt that Hari will be another Dali, equally as ground breaking and well-known, but that "it is coming slowly and that is the best way." It is evident that success agrees with Hari, who has known some measure of it since his early teens. Accessible, enthusiastic, he is brimming with anecdotes about his meetings with the Beautiful People. In spite of a studio in New York and possibly a home in Florida, Hari says he has no plans to abandon the Perth Amboy address, and even speaks of roots in the town with some measure of local pride. And when it is time to pose himself, Hari's old instincts for what is promotable surface. He'll wear his favorite cowboy hat in front of his easel, he suggests. Or perhaps a shot of him skate-boarding in front of the building. For all his familiarity with celebrity, he talks chummily with the visiting photographer about lenses, and helps the shooting along by setting up his own studio lights. Then he walks both photographer and reporter to their car, invites them for lunch, writes down their names and addresses. "Have you ever painted any sports figures?" the reporter asks in one last stab at the full range of Hari's experience. "Not really," he answers, pausing to ponder, then adding, "Well, one - Pele." "How did you meet, Pele?" the reporter queries, probing again into Hari's incredible mixture of luck and brass. "Easy," he answers. "I just called him up." |
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