Twelve Portrait Exchanges Now Complete

Jorge Rivera and Peter Walsh exchange portraits in Central Park, Saturday, August 7, 2010.

This past Saturday, August 7, 2010, on a cool summer morning on beautiful Wien Walk in leafy Manhattan, artists Jorge Rivera and Peter Walsh completed the twelfth portrait exchange of the Central Park Portrait Exchange. Six new drawings (three exchanges) are now included in the Flickr slideshow at the top of this page. If you don’t see the slideshow there, go to the Drawings page listed in the menu on the right hand side of this blog.

Comments from Peter Walsh:

"In a small change up from standard procedure with the project, I drew Jorge first, and then sat for him. We had a very interesting conversation about marriage, divorce, Colombia (he’s from Bogota originally), the legal battle over artists' right to work in the parks and drawing techniques.

When he first arrived in New York City about ten years ago, Jorge worked with charcoal pencils but he says he quickly changed to the small Chinese charcoal sticks that are favored by many of the Chinese artists for their speed in rendering a portrait. I find them to be similar to a Conté crayon except that they are less chalky and a little bit greasier. I still use a hard charcoal pencil, but, learning from the other artists, I now keep them with a shallower point so that I can use the side of the point to lay in shadows quickly  – a very effective technique when time is of the essence.

Jorge has also adopted the popular method of first drawing the eyes of a person completely and then drawing outward. 'The eyes are the life of the drawing,' he says 'You have to begin there.'"