Wandering around art galleries, there can’t be many of us that haven’t spotted a stunning picture hanging on the wall on the opposite side of the room. But getting closer, usually at about twenty centimetres from the canvas, the lines which work to produce a fabulous piece of work when seen from afar reveal themselves to be crude marks and smudges upon closer inspection. It seems that if you want to enjoy a lot of pictures at their finest, you have to keep a certain distance.
But it’s not like that out there in the real world, beyond the confines of the clinical walls of the art institutes. Wood grain, leaves, marble, particles of sand and dirt and other natural ‘images’ do not deteriorate in definition when we approach them. At the very least, they retain the same level of complexity. Is it just laziness on the part of artists that sufficient detail is rarely put into art works in order to ensure that they retain their power whether viewed from a distance or right up next to the canvas itself?
Lazy is certainly not a word you could use to describe American waiter and illustrator Billy Pappas, who spent over eight years of his life (1994-2003) working full-time on a single 14-by-17-inches pencil drawing of Marilyn Monroe. A typical day for Pappas during this mammoth project involved working on an area the size of a full-stop in a newspaper. He would do this using 20-times magnifying glass goggles and special custom-made equipment to stop the movement of his heartbeat from affecting his level of precision. This remarkable and truly ambitious project was funded by a wealthy and eccentric Maryland architect who handed over envelopes of cash on a monthly basis. At many tourist sites in China you can buy a grain of rice with your name written in Chinese on it, but it seems unlikely that an engraver would spend more than an afternoon accomplishing such a task, let alone over eight years.
According to the question and answer video clip on Pappas’ website, the iconic subject was chosen in order to expand the potential audience. If you’re going to spend the best part of a decade on one piece you might as well make it as accessible to as many regular people as possible. Whether or not Pappas had this intention, the ubiquity of the subject matter actually shifts the focus away from Marilyn and onto the pioneering techniques that Pappas employed. This artwork definitely says a lot more about process and technique than it does about Marilyn Monroe, but that might only be because no artist has ‘zoomed in’ this far before.
Pappas based the drawing on one particular photograph of Marilyn, but studied many others for help with specific facial features. I would argue that the mere replication of most photorealism alone is not great art, for the imagination of the artist is largely absent, other than in any unconscious imperfections which are themselves very much the enemy of the technique itself. But this piece is so detailed that it goes beyond merely reproducing a photographic image using a pencil and paper. The drawing contains more graphic information than the photo on which it is based. The real art here is in the imagination needed to go several steps further than the photograph in order to create what Pappas himself calls the ‘sharpest’ drawing ever produced. You can see of all Marilyn’s blemishes; moles with miniscule hairs sprouting out of them; skin tone imperfections; even the lines of the veins in her eyeballs which Pappas had to invent himself, having found no relevant photographs of sufficient detail. ‘You have drawn the mammal!’ exclaimed one of Pappas’ supporters on viewing the completed work for the first time. Marilyn the mammal indeed!
Even high resolution images found online are unable to do justice to such a level of artistic detail and I haven’t seen the artwork personally. I can only assume that to see the ‘real art’ beyond the photorealism replication requires the aid of a magnifying glass. Thus whereas most pictures lose definition as we approach them, this piece actually goes beyond our natural human optic capabilities. Pappas’ drawing may look average when viewed from across the room, but as one wanders closer to it, one gets pulled in further and further to the limits of our physiology. We use magnifying glasses to view features that not even Marilyn’s most observational lovers would have noticed, or would perhaps have even wanted to.
When discussing Pappas and his mad project with a few friends at East End boozer The Eleanor Arms, the conversation took a turn towards the atomical. Would it ever be possible to make art with implements or materials the size of atoms? If so, in theory we could create an artwork the size of a molecule out of two atoms. One troubling aspect which might prevent Pappas copyists from taking his method to this extreme, if it were ever possible, is that if one were using two solid atoms then, on completion, after eight years of hard work, the artwork might simply turn into a gas and evaporate!
Searching for comparisons to Billy Pappas’ dedication and precision didn’t take long. One of my favourite artists of all time, Richard Dadd, spent nine years (1855-1864) painting the phenomenal Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke using a magnifying glass. But whereas Pappas was a free man who had to pay the bills, Dadd was locked up in Bethlem psychiatric hospital (Bedlam). Come to think of it, Pappas’ next project wouldn’t need any funding at all if he could think of a relatively harmless crime that would get him incarcerated for a decade or so yet allow full access to his drawing equipment. However, if I were the jailer I’d keep all photographs away from Pappas for the duration of his prison term, along with any other items which might serve as direct inspiration for yet more photorealism. Out of the two, I’d far rather have Dadd’s painting hanging on my wall mainly because it came much more from his imagination than Pappas’ drawing, the subject matter of which I find incredibly dull. So no windows, no books, no internet access and no visitors for Pappas.
Both friend and foe to the critical success of the whole Pappas project was the documentary made about him entitled Waiting for Hockney. This follows him both before and after completion of the work. Regarding the choice of title, Pappas was under the odd misapprehension that if David Hockney could see the completed Marilyn picture then he would be impressed enough to help Pappas make a full-time career from further commissions. Enough strings were pulled that eventually such a meeting did occur but, whilst the elder artist was impressed with the ‘scrutiny and rigour’ which Pappas employed, it is revealed that after the meeting Hockney stops returning Pappas’ phone calls and confides to an assistant that the artwork is ‘still that fucking photograph’ on which it is based. Hockney’s assistant takes great pleasure in relaying this information in the documentary and he comes across as a smug, repugnant individual who looks down upon anyone who is not ‘part of the art world’ of social connections, elitism and ‘famous names’. Whereas Pappas’ original letter to Hockney wrote of the importance of great art having an impact ‘beyond the initiated’ few who either read the theory or work in the industry, Hockney’s assistant appears adamant that nobody except the initiated can make informed comments on particular artworks.
I think it’s fair to say that if Damien Hirst had spent eight years on such a piece then it would be heralded as a monumental, pioneering work by a true genius of our time. As it is, although he studied illustration, Pappas is stuck out in ‘untrendy’ Baltimore, working as a ‘low status’ waiter both before and after the Marilyn epoch. The film concludes with him ending this particular artistic odyssey by getting back to work at the Suicide Bridge restaurant. You really couldn’t make it up. Whilst the job is, of course, utterly menial it is clear that Pappas feels good being around real human beings again after his reclusive artistic marathon all alone with Marilyn.
As the documentary sets the emotional centre on the meeting with Hockney, building the tension up beforehand and analyzing the inevitable post-meeting deflation, Pappas himself makes the fundamental mistake of pinning all of his hopes on the opinion of one man. Pappas does not feel like a ‘proper’ artist and hopes that this picture will turn him into one overnight once Hockney has gazed upon it. Hockney himself must have felt uneasy both in the often-clumsy relationship of famous person and fan, and more broadly at such a pressured situation in which eight years of a man’s life would ultimately be vindicated or scorned. It may well be the case that it’s going to take considerably more than eight years for any of us to begin to understand Pappas’ Marilyn. Even if Hockney had been entirely impressed with the work, his long-term approval may have breached an unwritten agreement between all other artists that spending so much time on one picture was simply going ‘too far’.
As he readies himself for the meeting in the documentary, we see Pappas putting on his best suit and pinning some wacky badges onto his tie in preparation for the Stars in Their Eyes-style transformation from Baltimore waiter to international art pioneer. I think both he and Hockney would have been more comfortable had Pappas just been wearing his usual T-shirt and jeans. Such clothes would have shown a real self-confidence. Pappas all tarted up creates the impression that he knows he’s just an amateur and trying sneak into the door marked ‘International Artists Only’. Perhaps he should have assumed that door was for him anyway and just strolled in wearing T-shirt and jeans.
Forgetting for a second his wardrobe misdemeanors, I think Pappas is deserving of a great deal of respect. It’s life-affirming and heartening to see someone who doesn’t already have all the industry connections and social status undertake such an ambitious and courageous project. If Pappas can make a name for himself with other pieces over time then maybe one day he will be allowed into the Artists’ Exclusive Club of people who make a full-time living from it. For now, though, there will be no queue-jumping for Pappas, unless he gets intimate with Tracy Emin or something. It would appear that he is yet to receive a follow-up commission but he reckons he could do the next one in ‘just’ six years. As many cynical insiders know, a significant part of the art industry is little beyond financial speculation when it comes to both ‘knowns’ and ‘unknowns’ and the sum required to commission even just a six-year project is bound to put most people off.
As is the strange nature of the art world, ‘Marilyn’ will probably be worth a large sum after Pappas’ death, perhaps as a curiosity piece but hopefully as an ‘early Pappas’ should he either get incarcerated with his pencils or get some new commissions. There is definitely one wrong that needs righting as soon as possible – Pappas is currently only the second most famous Billy Pappas. Look up ‘Billy Pappas’ on Wikipedia and you will find a page about a table football champion. Whereas Pappas the artist zooms in, Pappas the table football champion zooms out, trying to control an entire team of players with just two hands. I wonder how far artist Pappas could ‘zoom out’. I have visions of him drawing a 14-by-17 kilometre picture of Marilyn in the desert with a giant laser from 30,000 feet in less than a minute.
Daniel Patrick Quinn, January 2012.