ArtistsAsActivists

For the new portraits, Conal geared himself up to do something else entirely. “It freaked me out to try to apply my style of representation to a positive image,” Conal says. “Here I am working on this big Gandhi and pretty much shaking in my shoes. I took all my gnarly and painterly techniques and I used them to turn the painting into a facial topography of everything Gandhi had come through.” Indeed, these subjects bear the same deep facial contours and ravines as his previous portraits, but they convey depth and character, not hideousness.