From the Boston Herald and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The National Portrait Gallery has commissioned Wisconsin artist David Lenz to create a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics and has championed the rights of people with intellectual disabilities for decades.

Lenz was selected after winning a portrait competition sponsored by the museum. The winning painting, “Sam and the Perfect World,” depicts his son, Sam, who has Down syndrome and is an active Special Olympics athlete. (see above)

At the time that Lenz won the competition, his style of straightforward realism was described as “unfashionable in the art world.”

In the painting, Sam leans forward quizzically and confidently meets the viewer’s gaze. Behind him, beyond a barbed-wire fence that runs low across the frame, a lush valley opens up and a sun stands high with a halo-like ring around it.

The natural world is precise, rendered with almost photographic precision, and yet it verges on something magical and ideal, like the “Golden Valley” in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. Sam seems connected to this world but also separate from it.

“This creates a mystery,” says [Portrait Gallery director Marc] Pachter. “We don’t really know who the boy is. We don’t understand . . . It invites us to wonder about him.”

… “The experience of being Sam’s father changed me to the core,” Lenz wrote in an online journal that was part of the portrait competition’s Web site. “And I knew someday Sam’s influence, his point of view, would come to bear on my art.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 2:02 pm and is filed under arts/music, celebrities, Down syndrome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.