I met the Hungarian photographer
George Cserna in New York City in the
early fifties. I can't remember the circumstances but he asked if he
could take some photos of me in the studio I had way downtown in 4th
Street.
Then in 1956 he turned up again in San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico, where I was a student at the Instituto Allende. Cserna
took some more photos there on a day when Reg Dixon (who was teaching
ceramics) was posing for the class and I was painting him.
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| Natalie d'Arbeloff in her studio, NewYork City 1953. Photo by George Cserna. |
 |
Getting serious.
Reg Dixon and I got married in 1957. |
 |
| The
portrait I painted in San Miguel de Allende now hangs in the Vancouver
home of Valerie Dixon, Reg's youngest daughter, my very dear friend. |
2 comments:
When I embarked on my blog (then called Works Well) I swore I would never show photo portraits of myself. That I would be known only through my prowess as a writer - a fine self-abnegatory posture. But it's an insidious tendency. I think it started with a photo of a shivering, spindly teenager at an outdoor swimming pool in the shadow of Ilkley Moor (of "baht 'at" fame). I was able to justify this on its deprecatory nature. Later "heroic" photos of me abseiling (too distant to be personal) and ski-ing (face obscured by sun-glasses). Then I started to use my face as an exemplar of seamed mournfulness (explained in the text) and as a playground for surgeons following minor facial cut-and-paste. But by then I had crossed the vanity barrier. Self-congratulatory photos of me smiling at Cologne's Christmas market appeared and I was done-for as a blushing violet. It is difficult to disavow one's face.
Don't you think?
Thanks for commenting Robbie. As a painter, my face has always been a convenient and ever-available portrait model so I don't think I've every disavowed it. This doesn't mean self-congratulating, on the contrary I rarely liked my face. It's only when I look at old photos now that I think h'm, I was not bad after all. But of course with time vanity does take over and it becomes necessary to adjust the lighting, the angle, the position of the hand on face etc.
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