Swihart, a California native, fell into portraiture accidentally. He started painting portraits in the late \u201870s and early \u201880s, but kept it mostly quiet because portraiture is often associated with \u201cselling out,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
But the commissions kept coming.<\/p>\n
Today, his star-studded clients include actor Clint Eastwood, former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor and architect Frank Gehry, to name a few.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially when I\u2019ve painted famous people, I realize they\u2019re just as self-conscious or wanting approval as I am,\u201d Swihart said. \u201cI painted Walter Cronkite years ago, and when I was working on it his secretary called me and was talking really quietly, and she said: \u2018You know, Walter asked if you could tame his eyebrows.\u2019 I was like, \u2018That\u2019s what he\u2019s self-conscious about!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
For corporate portraits, like a recent painting of the CEO of FedEx, Swihart noted that it\u2019s about \u201cpainting somebody the way people see them, the way they imagine them to be \u2026I have to make them look confident. I can\u2019t paint the vulnerable side of them. People don\u2019t want to see that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Swihart, a California native, fell into portraiture accidentally. He started painting portraits in the late \u201870s and early…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":110631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-110630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114954327035952989","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}