Closer Look, Traveling with the Stars: Jeffrey Hein packs for the journey.  By John T. Spike.

 Some years ago, New York artist Paton Miller painted a still life showing a pitcher, bowl and some other things on top of a kitchen table.  Though sketchily brushed, the simple pottery exuded a sense of importance.  Asked if this effect was due to any influence, the surprising reply was, “Yes, Botero.”  And yet the painting had none of Botero’s trademark fatness.  “That’s true,” Miller said, “but I was looking at how he makes everything so solid.”

It’s a question of language.  Artists can learn from each other without needing to borrow the message.  It’s curious how we understand that writers, in order to grow, should read other writers.  By contrast, painters and sculptors are expected to reinvent the wheel.  But gaining command of a language of form and color is a technical step that neither guarantees nor curbs originality.  The young Raphael,age 17, wanted nothing more than to resemble his master Perugino: It was not an attitude that held him back.  David Hockney memorized Picasso line by line, and turned out OK.  The only reasonable question to put to both artists and writers is: Now that you have mastered your language, what is it you wanted to tell us?

“Metro” is a striking new canvas by Jeffrey Hein.  Bear in mind that the girl and her luggage are almost life-sized.  One has to restrain the impulse to ask if she needs directions.  Hein is a savvy young painter well aware of the dilemmas facing contemporary realists.  He wrote recently: “My current work is a product of much experimentation on how I could paint a portrait that clearly identifies the qualities of the sitter while making it interesting and ambiguous enough that the viewer could enjoy it (to the point of living with it) regardless of the identity of the model.”  Rembrandt would have posed the problem differently, but apart from his greatness, the old Dutchman had an audience he could count on to look long and carefully.  For artists, that changed with the advent of magazines and flickering screens.

So how can a painter arrest our attention?  Hein’s “Metro” is executed with crisp, saturated colors and dazzling optics that recall the ‘60s, and we haven’t even begun to touch on the figure or the subject.  By rights, it shouldn’t be possible to paint a picture with equal debts to Norman Rockwell, Ellsworth Kelly and Wayne Thiebaud, but Hein does it with aplomb.  “When people look at my work, I hope that they are attracted to it because there is something interesting about it, even if they can’t put their finger on it, hey says.

It may be that the color coordination has the upper hand.  This young lady is a walking (or sitting) advertisement for red and black, right down to her tinted lenses.  Many Pop artists came from commercial art backgrounds.  Except for her marvelously strong expression, “Metro” is a still life of bags rather than Thiebaud’s still lifes of pies and cakes, only the brushwork is smoother.  ON the other hand, the composition is as calculated as a geometric abstraction.  The shadows anchor our patient sitter and her baggage in a 2-D landscape.

Like Rockwell, Hein likes to paint his neighbors and friends in situations approximating real life.  But Rockwell looked for humor to lend appeal to his covers for the Saturday Evening Post (my grandfather had a subscription).  John Currin, who recently had a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, likes to take Rockwell’s caricatures to absurd extremes.  Hein starts out with a portrait.  His next concern is “to strip the concepts of my art down to the basics of design and technique.”  “Metro,” he writes, is about a train station, but “a representation of an environment was not intended.”  Recently there was a station like this in a movie—“The Matrix.”