An old friend gets a big prize

I'm always interested when they announce the MacArthur "genius grants" because the recipients are such an interesting and unconventional cross-section of accomplishment.  When the 2015 list came out earlier this week, I knew a few of the names, but Nicole Eisenman wasn't really one of them.  I knew she was a painter, and that she's hot in the art world these days, but I couldn't have picked her work out of an array unless everybody else in the array was Monet.

But yesterday's New York Times had an interview with her, and there on the front page of the Arts section was somebody I recognized instantly:

Nicole Eisenman, Breaking Up

Let me explain.  In 2012 when I was doing hand stitching as my daily art, I went through a stage of appropriating portrait images from famous artists.  Among them was this unhappy dumpee, who just got the bad news via text message.

Here's how I rendered him:

I had found the picture in an ArtForum magazine and I'm sure it had Eisenman's name on it, but that never stuck in my memory.  I just liked the image and thought it would be a good inspiration for a day's stitching (check out all my daily stitching here).

I think I did a good job of replicating the unhappy guy, even if I did a bad job of remembering whose work I had copied.

Anyway, now I have made the connection and from now on I will follow Eisenman's career with a more proprietary attitude.