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ABOUT THE ARTIST
A Personal Foray into Creativity and Expression
"If you want to be happy, set yourself a goal
that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your
hopes. Happiness is within you. It comes from doing some certain thing
into which you can put all your thought and energy. If you want to be
happy, get enthusiastic about something."
--Dale Carnegie
Over more than two decades, from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, I sought various
paths to personal happiness -- not only through the study of art, but also
through foreign language and world history, as I traveled throughout the world. My
travels inspired me, and my cultural explorations greatly stirred my imagination;
I became enthusiastic about learning, especially about ways that I may
be creative.
This driving force toward creativity drove me beyond what I
thought I was capable of. By embracing this force, I was able to honor
my nuclear and extended family in various ways. This drive led me to
various endeavors, e.g. I created a quarterly journal in hard copy for
both sides of my family and mailed copies to those
in my family who were interested in receiving them. This was in 2003-2004. By
interviewing various family members at that time in order to learn more
about my family and gather stories of our collective family History, I
was able to learn much about relatives I had known little about and more
about those that I did something about. From all of this I was
able to create a website,
the
Museum of Family History,
which honors my family and many, many others. Within what I present to
you now, I simply learned how to paint their portraits, mostly in
pastel, which was a media I used in deference to my love of French
impressionism. In this way I was able to honor them by sharing their
visage with others. In doing so I have kept our memory of them alive.
In the mid- to late-eighties I painted or drew in pastel most of my
immediate family members, as well as various aunts, uncles, cousins,
etc., but I stopped doing all of this in the early 1990s. Along the way,
I took a few art adult ed classes and took two rewarding study art
vacations, both in the mid- to late-1980s: to Paris, France and San
Miguel de Allende, Mexico. My studies both domestically and abroad, plus
visiting most of the major art museums in the world, inspired me to not
only create art, but to learn about art and iworld history and the
various humanities. It was quite an experience!
Well, it has been more than twenty-five years since I ventured abroad,
and it had been thirty years since I had drawn my last portrait
(it was a hobby then as it is now, not a profession), mostly in pastels.
However, in the early 2000s, I pivoted creatively and began to create two wonderful
websites honoring the family unit in general, and since then I have
solely became interested in my website work. I became more interested in
Jewish-related subjects: I became interested in helping others honor and
preserve their family history, in learning the Yiddish language, theatre
and translation. Subsequently, I lost all
interest in my hands-on, approach to portraiture. Such is life.
Many of the friends and acquaintances that I have met over the
past few years have written or spoken to me about how much they liked my
past portraits that I had proudly shared with them over a meal, showing
images of many of my works from my smart phone. Hence they prodded me to begin my artwork once again. I quickly became
eager to obsessively draw portraits from photographs, using the famed
"grid method." Although I prefer to draw from a live model in theory,
the grid method allows me to extract a more precise, realistic portrayal
of the model. I am a realist artistically, so I have felt the grid can
help me capture a good likeness of a model.
I would say that perfection, as I see it, for me at least, is
an impossibility. I might get ninety percent of what I desire, i.e. the
creation of an "exact" likeness of a person. So I must learn to be content
with this. I might initially create a graphite portrait in two or three
days, but I am often amazed to discover that if I put aside my art work
for a time and look at it once again some with fresh eyes sometime
later, I realize that the portrait that I had drawn isn't as good as I
first thought, I continue to see things I need to improve on, so I continue for a
short time to tinker with each one from time to time until I finally
give up and accept my work for what it is, imperfect as it may be.
Often, it might look well enough like a person, but it is only ninety
percent, give or take, of the person's likeness ... Sometimes it is only
a question of a millimeter or two, but that's enough to make a
difference with accuracy! Anyway, that is how I see it. Any portrait is
only an "interpretation" of the subject. That's what they say ... It is
a wonderful exercise in patience and acceptance -- looking for the truth in what I
see, then trying to duplicate what I see on a piece of paper, and then
accepting the inevitable imperfection.
So within a month or two, from April to May of 2024, I drew with a single graphite
pencil (by using only a common Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2 pencil), nearly
a dozen portraits of myself and family members. I again became obsessed with art (although it is not
all-consuming!), as I was in the mid- to late-1980s and 1990s! I still have a life, but,
mind you, it is a fine hobby which I actively
pursue ...
I have, with trepidation, began to paint in pastel again, but I have only
created two
portraits to date; it is far easier to use my sharp and discerning eye to draw
in pencil, in black-and-white, what I see, rather than to attempt to
remember the techniques and rules of using color and have to deal with
all the complexities that come with it ... I
imagine I will eventually practice using pastels more and use them once
again in my portrait work ... Perhaps I even will try landscapes or
abstract art. These are all excercises in eloquence, so to speak.
As the poet, Alexander Pope, once wrote, “Hope springs eternal”!
Thus I started drawing portraits once again, after a layoff of more than
a quarter-century. I began drawing self-portraits and
portraits of my family members, all from photographs. My self-portraits
were created from photographs taken at different important times of my
life, e.g. when I became a bar-mitzvah boy at age thirteen, when I was
twenty-one and home from college; then when I graduated from optometry
school in 1978, then a couple from two photos that I took of myself more recently.
I
also have a series of professional baby photographs of myself that I am a bit leery to take on, but it
certainly would be an accomplishment if I could draw at least one
portrait successfully! I think I was a cute baby -- I had a lovely smile
in the photos, while I was looking at the camera, while holding the
children's book, "Let's Go Shopping."
I completed
a double portrait of my maternal grandparents, which I suppose is the
sister piece to the double portrait of them I painted in pastel some
thirty years previously, but the earlier one was of them when they were already
seniors, sometime in the 1960s ...
I have created three webpages for you to peruse here, in this exhibition
of my artworks, if you are
interested in seeing them. I have tried to give the year of completion
of my works, hoping that the
chronology will give you some perspective and lend to your imagination.
The first webpage of art is entitled, “My Art History,” which includes
photographs of more than one hundred pastel paintings (mostly portraits)
that I created from the onset of my artistic pursuits in 1986, to the
nearly one hundred graphite portraits I drew in 2024-2025. These are
portraits of “Our
American Stars,” mostly of Jewish entertainers from the American and
Yiddish stage, screen, television, radio and the music industry.
Twenty-seven of them were part of my first ever solo exhibition at
Delray Beach, Florida’s Weisman Community Center in the first half of
2025. Uniquely, I think, accompanying this exhibition was a professional
audio tour that I created. Each painting was paired with a descriptive
plaque and a link to a two- to five-minute audio clip (with the
AI-generated voice of a mature British female narrator) that told the
exhibition visitor about the life of the actor or actress. (The title of
this exhibition was “The Jewish Actor in America.”)
I am always looking for places to set up this, or any other art
exhibition of works in my collection, along with an audio tour, if
desired. If you know of such a place, please contact me at
stevenlasky@gmail.com.
I must admit that I am a museophile (museum lover)!
Lastly, you may also
like to visit my two virtual (Internet-only) museum sites, both of which
are so very interesting. You can easily spend weeks seeing and listening
to all I've created for them ... I have worked on them for more than twenty
years, and if you give it an honest look, you will see that for me they
are real labors of love! Below are the links.
Museum of Family History:
https://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com
Museum of the Yiddish
Theatre:
https://www.moyt.org
I hope you enjoy seeing my artwork here, which
has given me a lot of joy! Thanks for reading about me!
Best wishes,
Steve Lasky
October 2025
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