Heads & Tales

Heads & Tales

An exhibit of portrait art by Hal Higdon at the Vickers Theatre

For nearly three years I participated on a committee to plan the fiftieth reunion of Carleton College's class of 1953. If three years seems like an excessive amount of time to plan an event lasting only three days, consider that according to the Alumni Office: "It's the most cost-effective activity we do in the area of fund-raising."

During an early meeting, the publicity committee discussed a book of self-written biographies that would be given to each member of the class. The book would be titled Beyond the Tower and edited by classmate Jean O'Connor Fuller. The "Heads & Tales" exhibit of my portrait art planned for the month of May at the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, Michigan grew out of that book for which I contributed the art. Sometimes we volunteer for tasks that prove more formidable than expected--and often regret it. The first certainly was true, since I eventually did 102 portraits of classmates. Regret? I had the time of my life, and I believe it made me a better artist.

I used as my guide each classmate's yearbook photo from our senior year. Utilizing a photocopy machine, I enlarged each stamp-size photo by roughly eight times its size. Then I traced the outline onto a piece of illustration board. Finally, I used brush and ink to complete the portrait in what might be described as a "comic art" style. One of my toughest goals and tasks was to keep the drawings as simple as possible, particularly since they would be reduced again for the book. My artistic role model was Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfield. Our styles are dissimilar, but he served as my inspiration.

Consistency of line

Maintaining a consistency of line so that portrait # 1 resembled portrait # 102 stylistically proved a formidable challenge. I drew and redrew a number of the early portraits until I finally found a style I considered crisp enough. Once in stride, I found myself able to work rapidly; some drawings took less than an hour. But others proved more difficult and needed to be redrawn. Ironically, the toughest portraits were those of classmates I knew best! It was relatively simple to create a drawing that resembled the yearbook photo of someone not that close, but with close friends, memories sometimes got in the way. I redrew one classmate more than a half dozen times before satisfying myself that art matched memory. Several months later, when I showed the drawings to members of the planning committee, I overheard a classmate comment, "Oh, that looks just like (her)."

All the portraits appeared on the class website before becoming part of the book. Beyond the Tower gets its title from beloved Willis Hall, the oldest building on the Carleton campus. I did a drawing of Willis for the cover of the book; it too appears in the Vickers exhibit. I invited classmates to contact me if they didn't like their portrait, seen online. Only one did. He suggested a minor modification involving his lips. That seemed to satisfy him.

The exhibit at the Vickers Theatre grew out of my desire to show some of the art in public, while I still had it in my possession. (I plan to offer the original drawings to classmates who attend the reunion.) Choosing where to exhibit the art required some thought. Carleton had an active drama department. At least two of my classmates achieved a level of success in the theatre. Richard Christiansen recently retired as chief theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune. Kathryn Middleton Chapin has served as script supervisor for some of my favorite movies, including Network, Taxi Driver, The Prince of Tides, Bang the Drums Slowly and all of Woody Allen's films since Annie Hall.

The last picture show

This gave me the excuse to approach Jon and Jennifer Vickers, owners of the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, Michigan, to see if we could mount an exhibit of my work, using as our theme Heads & Tales: Heads for the portraits I drew; Tales for the accompanying biographies. Jennifer agreed. Some of the portraits can be seen below. If you visit the Vickers in May, you will see them on the main floor of the theatre. Several other portraits, unrelated to the book, will be hung above the balcony toward the back of the theatre. These are larger paintings, some of which are best seen from a distance.

That includes a portrait I did of Laurence McKinley Gould, who was president of Carleton during my stay on campus. Gould also was second in command of Admiral Byrd's expedition to Antarctica in 1928 and 1929. The book Cold, written by President Gould shortly after returning from that expedition remains riveting and timely even in these days of exploration beyond our world. I did the Gould portrait for an alumni exhibit at the reunion. It is painted in a style that might best be described as "photorealism."

For those of you unfamiliar with the Vickers Theatre, it is a small movie house in the town of Three Oaks, Michigan, remarkable in that the theatre shows well-reviewed films (most of them foreign) that do not receive as wide a distribution as do the top box office hits. The Vickers Theatre is only a 20-minute drive from where my wife Rose and I live in Long Beach, Indiana. It is the labor-of-love of a young couple, Jon and Jennifer Vickers. Because many Chicagoans spend weekends and summers in Michiana, Jon and Jennifer frequently have sold-out houses for films the shopping mall chains ignore. We rarely miss a weekend at the Vickers while we are in town. If the presence of Heads & Tales offers you an excuse to visit the Vickers Theatre, I will have succeeded in my goal.

--Hal Higdon

Heart of Art

Higdon's Home Page