Portraits show how houses become homes
From the Chicago Tribune, Sunday, November 28, 1999
By Todd Savage
Sleight of hand:
James R. Pinto lays bricks, installs shingles and paints porches. Heck, he even does yard work. The only tools Pinto needs to do his home building, however, are a paint brush and a palette of watercolors.
Pinto is a portrait artist who composes architectural paintings of homes. Contending with a fidgety sitter is not a concern in his line of work, but rendering a house portrait has its own unique obstacles. To present an unobstructed, flattering view of a house or give a client the picture that had been commissioned, Pinto is required to take some artistic license. He trims the bushes, uproots trees and scatters fall leaves on the lawn-all on paper, of course.
"I've probably moved more landscaping in the suburbs than most actual landscapers", says Pinto, who works primarily with clients in his native Hinsdale and the western suburbs.
Detail work: Each painting begins, not surprisingly, with a house call. Pinto often is commissioned to do paintings as surprise gifts for birthdays and anniversaries. Many of his clients have been owners of stately older homes. The artist takes photographs of the exteriors to help him sketch studies for the finished painting and match colors when he's back in his Lincoln Park studio. The portraits - typically 18 by 24 inches for a four to five bedroom house - are characterized by an intense level of precision that embraces everything from reflected greenery in windows to the fall of shadows.
"I'm not doing art for people with short attention spans," he says. "These are pictures that are going to hang in people's houses, so I want to feel that they can come back and look at the picture more than once and see something different each time."
There's no place like home: Pinto strives to create a painted image that is more than a photographic snap shot. He gives the houses a lush, idyllic quality, the way one might remember a favorite childhood home on a perfect spring day.
"(It's) an enhanced view of the house", he says. "It's like a writer telling a story. It isn't just simply the facts that you're putting down, but it's your presentation. It's filtered through your way of looking at things."
Artist of record: If Pinto had worked as an artist centuries ago in Western Europe, he might have painted castles and estates for nobles. The tradition of architectural portraiture dates to the Middle Ages, and it was particularly popular in the Renaissance, Pinto says. The uniquely vintage character of his portraits grew out of his own artistic history. One grandfather worked for the Otis elevator company, while the other, whose own watercolor paintings decorate Pinto's studio, was an architect in New York City. Pinto studied painting and architectural history and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is fond of painters Edward Hopper and Winslow Horner and Evanston-born photo-realist painter Richard Estes.
He always has enjoyed the rich collection of residential architecture in Chicago. "I've always been fascinated by the buildings and their effect on the environment," he says.
House proud: His clients have developed a deep connection to their houses because these are the places their families were raised or because they have made improvements to achieve the perfect vision of a home. Pinto says he hopes to instill this feeling in his paintings. "It's a very close representation of who they feel they are. I think it's more than 'Hey, look at me, I have a big, expensive house.' It's home, it's somewhere they have their memories."
