Artist Portrait Videos

Artist Portrait Videos is a programme compiled by Charlie Ahearn himself of five short artist portraits. He made them in the last four years on various occasions. The artists on question are all friends of the maker. The style of the videos is different in each case because Ahearn changed the mood to match the work of the artist portrayed. He managed to find a pleasant blend of home movie and artistic documentary. Juanito is about his twin brother John who is a sculptor making plaster casts of people in the street and also showing them in the street. In the video the South Bronx street kid Juanito is immortalised in plaster. Jane in Peepland is a portrait of Ahearn's wife, the artist Jane Dickson, who makes realistic drawings and paintings. In the video she works on a series of paintings of dancers in a peep show. Über Frau focuses on the sculptor Tom Otterness who is working on a large sculpture for the city of Münster in Germany. Between the shots of him making the gigantic work, Ahearn edits fragments from an old cartoon about Gulliver as giant. Kiki in the Flesh is a psychedelic portrait of artist Kiki Smith. She reads her poetic texts as she is surrounded by flowers and Indian music. The most recent video, The Clones of Bruce Lee, is about the painter Martin Wong who nostalgically paints the old Chinatown.