When Alex Katz paints one of his large, signature paintings, it is an act of the utmost concentration, a performance in which he draws on years of experience as well as on preliminary sketches, painted studies, finished drawings, and a large charcoal cartoon, transferring the bare bones of the image to his canvas. Then he is set to paint, and he usually finishes his paintings in one day. In this case, he painted the six-by-fourteen foot January III in five hours, as his son, Vincent Katz, and daughter-in-law, Vivien Bittencourt, videotaped him.

This painting furnishes an ideal example of Katz’s technique because we get to witness, in separate panels of a triptych framework, spontaneous passages of tree branches and the controlled modeling of a large face of his wife, Ada, the subject of many of Katz’s paintings.

What does it take to create a painting? A lot of effort, and we have it here firsthand. It’s an engrossing and compelling document of the artist at work.

Educational Media Reviews Online
By Sebastian Derry

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