Session Seven: Sharif Sadiq and Peter Walsh

Sharif Sadiq drawing on Wien Walk in Central Park. Photo by Peter Walsh.

Before coming to the United States about a dozen years ago, artist Sharif Sadiq trained at a traditional art school in Rawalpindi, Pakistan but also had a side gig painting colorful billboards advertising movies.

“The faces could be as large as 30 foot tall,” he says. “We’d paint them in sections in the studio and would only see the completed murals when they were put up in public. The eyes might be five foot across,” he continues stretching his arms out to either side to indicate the remarkable scale of the paintings.

Here in New York, Mr. Sadiq has studied at the Art Students’ League where he won a prize for his work and with the famed Minneapolis-based correspondence school Art Instruction, Inc., best known for their “Draw Me” advertisements in the back of magazines. He has been drawing portraits on Wien Walk in Central Park for about ten years, working mainly on weekends nowadays. Mr. Sadiq and Peter Walsh exchanged portraits on Saturday morning, August 14th, 2010.

Some comments from Peter Walsh:

“Sharif and I had a leisurely drawing session and we chatted at length over coffee as he set up for the day by assembling mattes for soon to be completed commissions. We talked shop over drawing techniques and I admitted that I still used the slower method of laying out the framework of a person’s face first rather than preferred method of the professionals – starting with the eyes and working outward. ‘That’s the original way,’ he says of my strategy, ‘I trained that way too.'

I drew first and am happy with the results although we joked that I made him look a little like artist Jorge Rivera who I drew last week and who was sitting just a few feet away. Sharif made a great smoky and nuanced portrait of me saying, ‘The public likes drawings to be very smooth but you are an artist so I’ll give you something more difficult.’ Thanks Sharif!”

Peter Walsh and Sharif Sadiq exchanging portraits in Central Park, August 14th, 2010.

The drawings will be posted soon.