WHAT LIES BENEATH
Niall MacMonagle
Young Capote
FROM Indianapolis, Jonathan McAfee’s background is “more creative than artistic”. Father worked in advertising, one brother’s a pianist, another explores urban development in his American Dirt blog. Aged nine, McAfee drew animals from life and when, aged 15, he saw his first Andy Warhol painting, thought “Wow, I want to do that!” and went on to study art at Indiana University.
In 2014, aged 32, he chucked in his marketing job as account coordinator, “not a job I went to school for”, asking himself, ‘Will I keep working hard no matter what? If the answer is yes, what do you really have to lose?’” He and his wife moved to Denver, then to Evergreen, a small town nearby, and “unless we get run out of town by the wealthy young, I don’t see myself going anywhere”. Up by 6.30am, to “coffee, emails and a longer to-do list than is actually possible”, every weekday is a studio day, but weekends “I spend with my wife, hiking, doing something outdoors”. McAfee has painted animals, still lifes but “portraits excite me the most”. Obama, Twain, Bukowski and iconic Native Americans and cowboys have featured. This famous face, Truman Capote’s, took six hours. “I painted the blank canvas blue before sketching the face but gut instinct told me to leave it.” That blue matches those piercing blue eyes. He’s painted Kurt Vonnegut 14 times, Capote only once but would be happy to paint another if commissioned.
“About as tall as a shotgun and just as noisy,” Capote also said of himself, “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.” Born on September 30, 1924, to a 17-year-old mother who divorced his salesman father when Capote was four, Harper Lee portrayed him as Dill, a lonely child, in To Kill A Mockingbird. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood [McAfee’s favourite] are works of genius. Capote died of drug-related liver failure at 59. He would have been 94 today.
For McAfee, “a photograph captures something that was, a portrait allows me to create something out of nothing”, but admits “he would be lost without photography”. Here, McAfee captures on canvas what Warhol saw in Capote, that young, defiant, wide-eyed stare, those young blue eyes. Here’s looking at you, kid.
Instagram = @jonathan_mcafee