I LOVE WORDS WITH IMAGES

Introduction by John Mitchell, September 1, 2025

PEPPER AND RIFF STARTED coming to the studio for sessions on Monday April 13, 2017. Mondays were their night for the duration of the making of the “Pepper and Riff” painting.

On May 7, 2018, while sitting, Pepper read aloud from an essay that she had written about her and Riff’s involvement with the making of the painting up to that point. I was delighted that she had written such a wonderful account of what it was like to sit for this painting, week after week for over a year at that point.  

Here’s my final session journal entry from Monday June 25, 2018:

Pepper’s music night. Riff tried to persuade her to play Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album (I was into that idea too). But Pepper wanted to listen to Citizen Cope, Alabama Shakes, Amy Winehouse, and Lana Del Ray. All sounded good to me. I felt possessed tonight! Like some great painter spirit came in and took over.

Riff asked for a purple aura. I was happy to do that – knowing that I’d paint over it later. The last thing I worked on was the shadow on Pepper’s straight leg. Then it felt right to say “Done!”

They both seemed excited and agreed that it’s in great shape. I asked them to leave their clothes. I plan to have them back one more time before the exhibition in September. For now, we need to let the paint settle and see how it looks.

I do feel we could go much further in this painting. But given the circumstances – with a two-week trip to Missouri coming up, the heat of mid-July and August with no air-conditioning in the studio, and the exhibition opening on 9/7/18 – now is the time to stop. It’s balanced, looks good, and I’m willing to make the compromise of stopping now. Plus, post 9/7/18 – I will start a whole new group of paintings.

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WE’VE BEEN SITTING for John for more than a year. Our slot is Mondays at six. We arrive. I change in the back room, where all the models’ clothes are kept, into what I now consider a costume – a 1960s wool cape and a voided velvet wrap, purchased from the defunct Chinese luxury Fifth Avenue department store, Shanghai Tang. I bought the 2010 shoes from Sophia Amorosa’s then-online gold mine, NastyGal. They sat in my closet, neglected then forgotten, the clear plastic yellowing, until the occasion to wear them finally arrived: when John asked me and my boyfriend Riff Tressan to sit for a portrait. We leave our costumes at the studio for continuity. John does not want to repaint my hair into a Mohawk or put mink slippers on Riff in the eleventh hour. Last week, however, I got my first pedicure of the season, and periwinkle has been faithfully applied to my portrait toes.

About six months into the collaboration, my wardrobe began to become realistic on the canvas, transcending fashion. I can’t imagine wearing either garment ever again. Maneuvering in a cape is tricky. I got paint on mine during the first sitting; the hem brushed John’s palette as I was climbing down from the platform where we sit. The next week a step stool appeared, a studio gift from John’s girlfriend, Anki King, to help me descend from the platform gracefully despite treacherous footwear and voluminous drapery. The Anki stool has saved my life more than once. I imagine the paint smudged-cape a mystery for a future fashion or art historian, the cape the menfolk call red, and that I, a fashionista, call shocking pink. Little Red Riding Hood has been mentioned in reference to the cape, but I wore my variation, with the turquoise silk, as a nod to caped and draped sisters, mothers, saints, and whores of the Renaissance. The fabric colors are also a cheeky combination of Riff’s beloved Aristotle and his reviled Plato, as they appear in Raphael’s The School of Athens.

I am also wearing a small Frida Kahlo reproduction of her 1946, La Venadita (Little Deer), which I bought with my best friend Alina in a West Village knick-knack shop. It usually hangs on my bedroom wall but is now on my left chest, and at the heart of John’s painting. The little image reminds me of my sister Tina, who, like Frida, died young (47 and 49), crippled by ailments beyond their control.

Originally, Riff’s foot rested on an old taxidermy polar bear head that John had lying around the studio. This caused controversy on social media when John posted a photo of the setup. We had to find a less provocative prop. John added a plastic bucket under Riff’s foot as a placeholder. Then we came up with the idea to rest his foot on a stack of books, perhaps from his favorite philosophers. Before I fell asleep one night, I remembered a pair of massive books in a slip cover he bought at the Strand a few years ago, Mortimer J. Adler’s two-volume The Idea of Freedom. Riff said the 1958 pair was rare and out of print, not a surprise at five plus pounds and twelve-hundred pages. The books are a non-philosophical study of ideas about freedom spanning twenty-five centuries of Western philosophy, from ancient Greece to now. A worthy footrest, but we still needed one more book to make the stack as high as the animal head had been. Riff added the Etymological Dictionary of Modern English by Earnest Weekley.

Posed on the ragged loveseat, holding hands, there’s plenty of time for speculation, reckoning and plain good old-fashioned daydreaming, especially when I have to stare at the little tack on the wall when John paints my face. I sometimes think “What’s to become of us?” Time in the studio slows and is doled out by each turn of the half-hour hourglass, John’s break system to make sure we stand up and stretch. And “by us” I mean the three of us-and sometimes, Anki, whom we usually pass as we are leaving and she’s coming home, like changing shifts in some postmodern art factory. Occasionally Anki gets home early and we all eat together at the bar by the kitchen. I enjoy these meals. I am no longer outnumbered by men. Anki and I eat the same thing, Mission burrito (broccoli, yellow squash, mushrooms, brown rice) on a spinach wrap, no onions. Solidarity.

There is plenty of time to talk, as long as John’s not painting my mouth. He paints with long brushes like the ones he saw Willem de Kooning use. John found a shop that custom-made them and bought all they had left, and then made his own out of bamboo. His arm started bothering him from holding his arm straight out night after night, known as Poker Elbow in physical therapy. So, we talk about Poker Elbow, as well as King Kong, Giacometti, peanut butter and jelly, #metoo, Anthony Bourdain, #BLM, Kendrick Lamar, Lars van Trier, Elvis, AC/DC, Lucian Freud, Lou Reed, Bladerunner, Walt Whitman, Lemmy (dog and man), Sam Cooke, Sonny Stitt, Missouri, Florida, Norway, and Brooklyn. Our conversations are all there in the painting.

Riff and I alternate music nights and when we’re lucky, Riff plays a beautiful guitar John’s son, Joey, left at the studio. Thanks to Spotify, we listen to music from every genre and decade – from Lady Day to the Thin White Duke, and Fats Waller to Willie Nelson – and I made John and Riff listen to the Hamilton soundtrack once. Riff eats prodigious amounts of popcorn, which John keeps stocked in the kitchen. All that corn makes Riff sleepy and sometimes, he moves to the real couch and naps at some point during the evening, snoring happily as soon as he shuts his eyes.

John says he likes vanity. He asked if I had any special requests with how I look and I responded “paint what you see.” This made him happy. I want to see what I look like through someone else. Playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.” I’m not sure I’ll see my soul but each week, we emerge a little more developed, with more depth, our likenesses’ layers becoming more lifelike. As the painting progressed, I became concerned that I looked too serious, or angry, or tired. I did not want people to see resting bitch face – or rather, I worked all day and am tired face – for eternity. I see my acupuncturist, Nyssa, on Wednesdays and she often asks to see the painting’s progress. I showed her the images on my phone and pointed out the upset look and how I wanted to switch to a subtle smile, something Mona Lisa’esque. She agreed, and added, “Yes, it’s all about your dimples.” My dimples, or as my mother would say, angel kisses, a favorite facial characteristic, one I think of as a reminder of the young me and a feature that makes my face mine. Leave it to the person who sticks needles in me to point out a detail I had forgotten about. Nyssa says she loves how John is “using color to carve us out of the canvas.” John wants us to be happy with how we look. He rigged a mirror so I could see myself and my oily likeness simultaneously, in order to come up with the right smile, week after week. After all, there is a fine line between a smile and a smirk.

There are things you can’t see on the surface of the painting. The beat-up loveseat slants down on my side. Sitting lower than Riff is not a metaphor for women navigating a crumbling patriarchal society. One Tuesday morning my sciatica woke me up, conjured by the triple threat of old cushion posture, five-pound platforms, and circulation-killing crossed legs. The next week, John cut a board to put under the cushions for more support, and though it raised me a bit and remedied my nerve, I’m still slightly sucked into the crumbling couch.

Early on, I remarked how I had always liked art with words and images: Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Basquiat, Ed Ruscha, etc., and so John painted the phrase I LOVE WORDS WITH IMAGES above my head, embedding ideas into the DNA of the portrait. That wine glass at my feet is filled with wine that turned and John keeps in a mason jar on his work table. I don’t always drink wine and prefer white, but he likes the glass as a counterpoint to Riff’s books, and I like the purple as homage to the late great Prince. My purple thumb nail (Essie color #368 “Sexy Divide”) is the only nail that’s polished. I rarely get manicures, but John requested I do the nail to set my hand more apart from our tangled fingers.

We stay as late as possible, 10:30 or so, and then hurry back to Hell’s Kitchen, catching the L subway train before it becomes late-night dodgy. Walking to the train, after hours of being happily immersed in John’s studio, stresses me a little. I am nudged back to the reality that the next day is Tuesday and I have to get up for work. So why did we agree to do this in the first place? Maybe it’s the symbiotic nature of it, learning new things each week, and being part of a creative process. Or helping make something to leave behind, a colorful document of us, now at this point in time.

PEPPER HEMINGWAY

June 2018

Pepper and Riff, 2017-18, Oil on Linen, 58 x 74"