For One Artist, A Time To Pick And Choose

By Shannon Hicks

When Daniel Duffy says, “There are a lot of exciting things happening right now,” he isn’t kidding.

The 40-year-old Newtown-based artist has a career that has been poised to explode for a few years, and thanks to years of intense studies, the cultivating of a talent that cannot be faked, and a few good breaks, Mr Duffy is breaking into the circles of clients he has been hoping to attract for a while. Mr Duffy is a contemporary American realist, portraitist, and an award-winning children’s book illustrator.

Last October, one of Mr Duffy’s paintings was awarded first prize in oil by Ridgefield Guild of Artists. “Florentine Morning,” a 1999 work, was chosen from among 350 works entered by amateur and professional artists throughout the Northeast for the 23rd annual RGA Annual Juried Exhibition.

This spring that painting and a number of additional Duffy works were among those featured in “The Winner’s Circle,” the resulting RGA show that comes as part of the prize of being named a winner in a division of the juried exhibition. The first place winners in each division are invited to present their works in a group show, and Mr Duffy jumped at that opportunity.

“They asked us to put together some pieces,” Mr Duffy explained while visiting the RGA gallery during the show’s run back in May. “I went far and wide and collected some pieces back from private collections in order to exhibit these.”

Last month, three of Mr Duffy’s works were also accepted into the 2001 Portrait Arts Festival, a four-day presentation and competition presented in June by The American Society of Portrait Artists Foundation. The event honors portrait painting with some of the nation’s leading professional portrait artists.

One of the works included in the show, which was presented in large part at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a portrait Mr Duffy just finished of John Sexton, who was announced as the new president of New York University on May 18.

“This is really exciting,” Mr Duffy said of the new portrait and the timing of its completion. Mr Duffy was commissioned about 18 months earlier to work on the artwork. He was also commissioned to paint the entire Sexton family — Mr Sexton’s wife, Lisa Goldberg, their son and two daughters. The NYU president has also begun referring Mr Duffy to additional friends and colleagues for portrait work.

It has been a long time coming, but Mr Duffy can now accept or turn down jobs based on what he wants to do for clients, and not necessarily the other way around.

“I do my interpretations of people,” he explained. His works are realistic portraits, but he does “not accept any portrait works if I would be constantly directed.

“There are lots of people out there who can do that if people want them to,” he continued.

Mr Duffy returns regularly — at least once a year — to Ireland, where his father was born and raised. After spending a lot of time there as a boy, then summering there during high school and even taking an extended visit between high school and college, Mr Duffy has been strongly influenced by the country’s beauty.

His father came to America, met and married his mother, and began raising a family in the United States. Daniel Duffy was born in New Jersey, one of six children his parents raised.

“All the family’s there, which is great,” the artist said. He attended Catholic school as a child, which did not provide much in the way of art training. But while in grammar school Mr Duffy began attending New Jersey School of Visual Arts, an art school that mostly had seniors for its students.

“It did give me a certain kind of freedom, to be studying art when I was that young,” the artist said.

One event that certainly played a major role in this man’s life came soon after: Mr Duffy met Carroll N. Jones, III, when he was 15. Mr Jones’ father was a preeminent portrait painter whose work appeared widely in magazines during the 1950s, and his grandfather was a respected illustrator. Mr Jones was perhaps the man who had the largest influence on Mr Duffy’s life.

“That’s where I learned how to draw in this amazingly accurate way,” said Mr Duffy. Drawing lessons ran for six hours each week in Mr Jones’ apartment in Hoboken. “His influence is very strong on my work. He’s a magnificent painter.

“He was really strict, so it was unbelievable training,” Mr Duffy said. Daniel then went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study painting, but left the school after only one year to return to study with Mr Jones. “He was a very conservative painter and did not like me going there. So I left and went back to continue apprenticing with him,” he said.

Mr Duffy took over Mr Jones’ portrait business at age 19, when Mr Jones retired from it to enter the world of fine arts. (In an ironic circle of events, Mr Duffy finds himself in a similar situation today. He is very good at his portrait painting, but would like to enter the “fine arts” world.)

Mr Duffy began working as a fine artist, and had his first solo show in 1980 at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J. Every one of his works sold at that first show, which helped the young artist get his first apartment. It also got him an important commission: New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean hired Mr Duffy to paint his daughter’s portrait.

At age 24, Mr Duffy was ready to return to school and was even offered a full scholarship, but problems with drugs and alcohol caused him to struggle his way through school. He switched to working with acrylics, focusing on Neo-Expressionist style, where artists express things through not only what is visible to the naked eye but also through the marks they leave on the canvases.

He graduated from Carnegie in 1987, and was selected over 700 other artists for work as a paleontological illustrator. He spent nine months working on bone studies, drawing while looking through a microscope. He felt like “very much a technician,” but calls that period “the most unbelievable training you could imagine.”

Next was commercial illustration, with Mr Duffy working on “project after project for a few years,” working on children’s book illustrations. He won awards for his work, but was unsatisfied with the genre.

“The children’s books were a great way to express myself while also getting paid,” Mr Duffy said, but the environment is — as any artist will say — stifling. There were deadlines; it was still a training ground at some levels; and of course the artists were being directed.

Today, of course, that direction is back in the hands of Mr Duffy.

“I do portraits to be an artist first, then to be a simple likeness second. My portraits are meant to be enjoyed by anyone,” he explained, “not just the sitter and their family.”