For Art’s Sake - Picture perfect
Portrait artist learns the art of elevation
Bill McMillan feels a familiar lurch each time he starts a portrait. Staring at the white, blank canvas, he hesitates, struggling with doubt. He feels it again when the background has been filled in — the bookshelves of leather-bound books, the piece of antique pottery — and there is nothing left to do but the face, a void he has left for the very last.
McMillan attests to what is undoubtedly a part of any creative person’s process — the invisible low of uncertainty and wonder if this thing one has set out to do, hundreds of times, will ever be pulled off again.
But McMillan has never failed to complete a portrait. He fits the work in on evenings and weekend hours after his job at a luxury Atlanta hotel. He often paints other employees at the hotel, dressed in their sous chef uniforms and settled in dignified repose on rich red upholstered armchairs.
McMillan’s painterly metier is unique and familiar all at once. He borrows some of the features of classical oil painting from Velázquez or his hero John Singer Sargent: the enveloping black backgrounds, the worldly, luxurious props of books and elegant furnishings that attest to an abundant life. But the people McMillan paints would be considered far from the aristocrats of portraiture’s lineage. They’re ordinary by many peoples’ estimation, and rather than hide that ordinariness, they wear it with pride. The cook uniforms, native Gambian dress and security officer blues they wear in McMillan’s portraits are badges of another kind, of accomplishment no less meaningful than the acres of land or livestock represented in 18th-century oil paintings that commemorated status in another age.
McMillan elevates his subjects, giving them an aura of privilege and contentment. He dignifies their surroundings. He makes diamond earrings bigger and regular chefs into executive chefs with slight alterations. And like any good portrait artist, he performs subtle nips and tucks that make his subjects look like their mind’s eye vision of themselves. He learned early on “if you paint them just the way they look, they won’t like it.”
Many of McMillan’s portraits are done for mothers and grandmothers. An image of a Hispanic sous chef nearing completion will be sent to the man’s grandmother in New York, and another portrait, of a Malaysian cook looking off thoughtfully into the distance, will be given to his parents back home.
The paintings don’t seem to really exist within the confines of Bill’s apartment. They are representations of real people out there in the world, awaiting their permanent home and seem merely at rest in the terminus of McMillan’s tiny, one-room space in the shady Clairmont Lodge. Advertised as “Atlanta’s most affordable place to live,” it has been McMillan’s home for the past eight years.
McMillan paints for hours after he returns home from his day job, the soothing sound of televised golf in the background. He leaves the TV on behind him and faces away from it as he paints, turning when the roar of the crowd indicates a memorable putt. He is not materialistic, and his room testifies to that — an exercise machine pushed into the corner, a small table set up with a hot plate, rows of clothes visible in an open closet leading to the bathroom.
McMillan works toward something ineffable with each painting, some part of himself mingled with the person he is painting. He has to push too much subjectivity away — because what these people want is a better version of themselves, and not the imprint of an artist.
So McMillan struggles to balance what is demanded of him and what he can do as an artist by inventing and filling in the backgrounds in his portraits and allowing the darkness to intrude. But there is always something more he wants to do, a part of himself he can’t quite express.
When he’s found that thing, then, he laughs, he can die.
McMillan can be reached at 404-267-1300, ext. 71216.
Look more
Like perky tulips signaling springtime, there are a number of bright, captivating shows blooming on the art front. Local artist/curator Jena Sibille offers a snarky spin on the notion of Fresh Milk in an exhibition April 3-24 at Eyedrum, 290 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The show features women’s firsthand written accounts of the complicated politics of breastfeeding in a culture that worships the tit when it’s attached to a Cheetah dancer and fears it when it’s feeding babies.
Babies are also on the mind of Judy Rushin, who will exhibit paintings and drawings devoted to the dark mysteries of childhood at Ballroom Studios April 3-May 2. 107 Luckie St., 2nd floor.
Local landmarks like the Clermont Lounge, the Variety Playhouse and the Two-Minit (Gorilla) Car Wash are charmingly rendered in Colleen Finn’s photo-based prints that have the old-fashioned appeal of vintage postcards. They will be on view at San Francisco Coffee, 1192 N. Highland Ave., during the month of April.
And speaking of Atlanta institutions, Sister Louisa, creator of tongue-in-cheek religious tchotchkes and ironic drag-queen, crack-head, urban theater will have her creations on view at the Radial Cafe, 1530 DeKalb Ave., beginning with an April 2 opening blowout from 6-10 p.m.