“We’re not looking for a gestural moment,” McCurdy said in an interview recently with the White House Historical Association, which acquires and funds official portraits of presidents and first ladies. “We’re looking for a more meditative or transcendent moment.” Wearing a black suit, white shirt and light gray tie with his hands in his pockets, Obama looks out of the canvas at the viewer with an enigmatic expression. Nothing else disturbs the composition. “What I love about Robert’s work is that he paints people exactly as they are, for better or for worse. He captures every wrinkle on your face, every crease in your shirt,” Obama said during Wednesday’s ceremony. “You will note that he refused to hide any of my gray hairs. He refused my request to make my ears smaller. By the way, he forbade me to wear a tan suit.” “It feels like you’re face to face, making a connection,” Obama continued. “I liked that, partly because presidents so often get aired. They even take on a mythical status, especially after you’re gone, and people forget all the things they didn’t like about you.” After taking the original photo from which McCurdy painted, the former president had no say in the final portrait, according to the artist. “It’s part of my process that the sitter can’t say anything about how the painting looks. It’s completely out of the process,” he said. “He was open to it and accepting of that process, so he never saw the images we worked from.” Former first lady Michelle Obama was just as nonchalant about her latest portrait after posing for pictures with her portraitist, New York-based artist Sharon Sprung, at the White House. “I felt that trust coming from her, that you do your thing, I do mine, I’ll trust you with your thing, and I think portraiture works better sometimes that way. That she didn’t contribute so much as introduce herself,” Sprung told the historical association. Like her husband, Michelle Obama’s portrait is painted in a distinctive style that breaks the mold of the more traditional portraits that hang in the White House. Wearing a light blue gown designed by Jason Wu, she sits on a couch from the White House’s Red Room, posing against a terracotta backdrop. Like the former President, she looks directly out of the frame at the viewer. “Your work is amazing, but it was your essence, your soul, the way you saw me, the way we interacted, and it shows in this beautiful work,” Michelle Obama said during the unveiling ceremony. The paintings are historic in another way: They capture the first black president and first lady. “They look different. But I also don’t think it needs to be explained to people. I think people seem to get it,” McCurdy said. When the Obamas chose artists for earlier portraits hanging at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, they chose black painters — Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald — who at the time were still emerging in the field. The painters behind the official White House portraits are both established artists. McCurdy, whose signature is hyper-photorealistic paintings against white backdrops, has painted Jeff Bezos, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall, among others. Sprung has had a long career in figurative painting, including paintings for Congress, and has an affinity for past White House portraits: When she was younger, she developed an artistic relationship with Aaron Shikler, who painted iconic White House portraits of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan. “I don’t want it to look like it happened in 2013, or whatever. I want it to feel like it happened in this time and place,” Sprung said in a video with the White House Historical Association. The artist selection process began while the Obamas were still in the White House, including personal interviews in the Oval Office. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, sat in on Sprung’s interview with the couple. Then-President Obama and McCurdy discussed the painting process, including the release of the finished product to the artist and the connection between viewer and subject he aims for in each of his paintings. “I think that immediacy really appealed to him,” McCurdy said. When Sprung visited the Oval Office during the Obamas’ tenure in the White House for a portrait discussion, she brought along some preliminary sketches of the then-first lady to give the couple a sense of her direction. “He picked a couple that he liked and she picked a couple that she liked, which were very different in mood. And I found that really exciting, but it gave me the feel of both,” Sprung said. McCurdy begins his process by taking about 100 photographs of his subject against a white background. After choosing just one to paint, the rest of the images are destroyed and a 12-18 month painting process begins. All Obama had to do, McCurdy said, was hold his ground and not move. “He did a great job on it,” McCurdy said. The former president was “charming” and “very present,” she said. When Sprung arrived at the White House to meet Michelle Obama, she decided to leave her paints behind — “I didn’t want to leave my mark” — but instead photographed her and chatted as the Obamas’ dogs barked. the grass. “I had them move furniture from the Red Room to the Blue Room because the light was better,” she explained in an interview with the White House Historical Association. Sprung is shorter than Michelle Obama. Her original plan to paint the first lady standing — similar to the official portraits of Jaqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan — ended up changing when she realized she was looking up at her rather than at her level. “I was going to make her stand up to give her a certain dignity — but she doesn’t need dignity. She has so much dignity that I decided to do it sitting down,” Sprung said. As McCurdy labored over the portrait of President Obama, it became a challenge to keep the project under full coverage. He does not work with assistants, but those who helped print the photos or happened to enter his studio were sworn to secrecy. He also had no additional meetings with the former President. Instead, during the 18-month painting process, the subject became less of a person and more of a work. “They become after a year, a year and a half, it becomes more of an object in a way, like a technical matter. I don’t feel like I really know them as I work with them on the canvas,” he said. For Sprung, the Michelle Obama portrait was the longest she had ever worked on a painting: Eight months. “I worked on it day and night. And I said good morning to her and I said good night to her,” he said. The hardest detail, Sprung said, wasn’t on her face or hands or any part of her body, but her dress. McCurdy’s challenge was to create a moment “where there is no time,” he said. “There’s no before, no after. It’s as if that moment would be the same in a long, like a ringing bell that just keeps on ringing. And it’s a way of locking the viewer into the moment,” he said.
