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Ted used to say to his friends: ‘Keep it down my little brother doesn’t know anything.’ Well, his little brother knew a lot more than he thought.” It took about two hours to get to Santa Monica. Right down there.” He motioned out the window, down to Will Rogers State Beach along the Pacific Coast Highway. “Ted was a great beauty and had a large selection of beaux to choose from. We grew apart by the time I was seven or eight.”īachardy’s older brother Ted was also gay. He simply didn’t understand me, or want to. “In fact, active discouragement from my father, who was determined that I’d get a job with security. His parents thought his flair for drawing “charming,” though they never gave him encouragement. “Always pictures of people, invented from my imagination or inspired by magazine pictures.” He attributed this fascination with people, especially celebrities, to his early love of the movies, but admitted that he’d never stepped into an art museum until he met Isherwood. Pleasure-the artist’s delight in seeing things freshly at every moment and in every season-infused his entire manner during our two-hour visit.įrom the time he was a child, Bachardy, who was born in 1934, loved to draw. Bachardy noted with pleasure that our visit was taking place on the first day of spring. The room was tidy and clean, awash with natural light. Pots of brushes and tubes of paint occupied the counter near a small sink. They are a small, representative sample of the thousands of paintings and drawings he has done over his long career. It painted itself.”ĭozens more of Bachardy’s bold, colorful portraits were hanging on the studio walls. It was one of those paintings in which I couldn’t put a brush wrong. I hadn’t worked on canvas in a couple of years and I felt rusty. I did it in preparation for the Jerry Brown sittings.
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I asked about the impressive painting of Isherwood. I’ve never tired of the view and I’ve lived here nearly fifty years.” “Around six o’clock in the evening, the whole place is lit up brilliantly.” He paused to pour us black coffee from a thermos. Now approaching his late seventies, he maintains a trim, athletic body. “The light is just wonderful,” Bachardy agreed as he showed me around the studio. On a recent visit to Bachardy’s painting studio-the converted garage of his home in Santa Monica-I was immediately struck by two things: the dazzling Southern California light glinting off the Pacific and a large oil painting of Isherwood that hangs on one of the walls. “And our downstairs room, which was quite obviously the worst of the three positions … was crammed to halfway up the stairs.” Don Bachardy with one of his isherwood portraits.
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In his diary entry for October 2, 1961, Isherwood wrote that the Redfern opening was “a truly marvelous event.” The more sought-after upstairs galleries, where two other shows were concurrently taking place, were “practically deserted,” he gloated. Perhaps best known as the author of The Berlin Stories (1945) and A Single Man (1964), he was Bachardy’s lover for over thirty years. “Chris” is of course Christopher Isherwood. “But because he was fond of Chris, he made an appearance.” “He almost never went out to social occasions at that time of his life,” Bachardy reminisced. Auden, as well as the aging Somerset Maugham. Everybody came to my party.” The list of attendees reads like a who’s who of gay London society at the time: Forster, J. And noticed he got: “It was a major event. By the end of the summer, I had quite a collection of portraits.”īachardy once called his period of drawing famous people his “boot camp,” providing the training-and exposure-that he needed to establish himself as a serious artist and get noticed. “All that year,” he told me during a recent conversation, “I drew everybody I met: John Gielgud, E.
#Little brother gay sex art series#
It was in the cramped, closely hung confines of a basement gallery that the 27-year-old Bachardy exhibited much of the work he had completed that year, notably a series of celebrity portraits. THIS OCTOBER marked the fiftieth anniversary of artist Don Bachardy’s one-man debut at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London in 1961.