Scholastic Art: When and why did you first start painting portraits?
Jordan Casteel: In high school, I got put in a drawing class that terrified me. This class appeared on my schedule and I thought it was going to ruin my GPA. But I found that I really loved being in the studio and drawing. I would pull pictures of my family from photo albums and then replicate those pictures as drawings. By the time I got to college, I was doing little cartoon portraits of my friends for their dorm room doors. My junior year, I studied abroad in Italy and started painting portraits of the grounds-keeping staff and my classmates. It was a unique opportunity to get to know my classmates and the people who were working on the facilities.
SA: What do you hope to learn or explore by painting portraits?
JC: Portrait painting is an opportunity for me to slow down and really investigate and engage with the person and their environment. I can get out of my head and my assumptions about who I’m drawing or painting and really get into the nuance of what makes that person who they are. It could be the subtlety of the way they hold their hands, or it could be the environment that I capture them in. It’s different than just taking a photograph and leaving.
SA: What role does color play in your work?
JC: Color is everything! My mother jokes that it was always a big thing trying to choose the color of my room. Today I take time to determine what colors will capture the essence and the energy that I want each painting to hold.
SA: How do you think about color as you begin a painting?
JC: My process begins with a tool called Color-aids, which are basically expensive paint chips. (I always tell my students they can just get paint chips and that would probably be as effective and a lot cheaper.) I use the Color-aids to determine the colors in a painting. I throw hundreds of them on the floor, and I just begin to play. I pick up one color that catches my attention or captures the energy of the person that I’m getting ready to paint. That first color goes on the background as a wash. It becomes a source of light for the painting. Once I’ve made that initial decision, I begin to pick out the rest of the colors. I put the Color-aids on the wall next to the canvas I’m working on, using them as a guide.
SA: Why is it important for you to select the colors before you start painting?
JC: It takes me out of my own intuitive decisions. I found in graduate school that there was a certain shade of blue that would show up in every painting. I wanted to use the Color-aids to push my sense of color and think more intentionally from the beginning about what my color choices are going to be. As I tell my students, preparing for a painting is almost like the prep work in cooking. It all comes together much more easily when I’ve read the directions and prepared myself for the moments when real freedom can exist—when I’m actually painting.