JEFF SCHER

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The New York Times Magazine
December 12, 2004
Year In Ideas Issue

The Animated Society Portrait

For a small consideration, Raphael immortalized the Medicis. Whistler and Picasso were known to take portrait work on commission. But after Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, society portraits fell somewhat out of style. Until recently, that is, when the brother-and-sister gallerist duo Harry and Maya Stendhal, of the Maya Stendhal Gallery in New York, decided to revive the practice by reinventing the society portrait in the form of a short animated film.

The Stendhals commissioned the painter and filmmaker Jeff Scher to do a portrait of a society friend of theirs named Susan Shin, an intellectual-property lawyer and influential charity maven. Scher filmed Shin and then “rotoscoped” the footage---projecting it one frame at a time onto a wall. He then watercolored the hundreds of resulting frames onto paper. Finally, he refilmed hundreds of these hand-painted images, much as you would film the drawings that animate a cartoon. Scher’s final project is an endlessly repeating three-minute film---or loop---of Shin, flickering, shimmering and changing colors appealingly, if not exactly momentously. (There is a point when Shin smiles that could be called the climax.) Granted, she’s no Jessica Rabbit, and the film’s facture is a bit amateurish, but the effect is flattering in its own way.

Not that facture has much to do with the Stendhals’ master plan. The point of the portrait---a gift to Shin---was to create a market sensation. And Shin was, for Harry Stendhal, the perfect loss leader, since she is “an icon of the times,” he wrote on a Web site he created for her. “She is glamorous and much sought after in New York, London, Paris, you name it.”

The Stendhals say they are now pleased to announce that clients are lining up to pay $25,000 for their own animated portraits (with the original frames included). Scher recently finished a birthday portrait for a client Maya Stendhal describes as “a 20-year-old daughter of art collectors from Miami.” In this work, “the motion was subtler, more intimate,” Stendhal notes. “It’s more like a motion portrait of Mona Lisa.” The artist is now working on a portrait of the actor Gabriel Byrne. After Byrne, Stendhal says, you’ll simply have to get on the waiting list.

- JOHN BOWE