The Portrait
It was time for goodbyes. I needed to catch my flight home and knew this would be the last time I ever saw my father. I kissed Dad on the forehead and said, “I love you,” and he replied in kind.
On the way out of his hospital room, I asked if he wanted the door open or closed. “Closed,” he said. I took this literally and metaphorically. Dad and I were closing out our time together. This would be new territory for me. Life without a father.
The trouble had begun a year earlier when my sister called to say that Dad was hospitalized with heart failure. Heart failure? The diagnosis seemed to come out of the blue. His kidney disease had caused heart failure, which in turn affected his liver. His vital organs were under attack. Not that I believed my 92-year-old father was indestructible, but I assumed he had more time. His father had lived to 98, and Dad kept himself in good shape both physically and mentally.
Dad’s work and family were everything. While he was in and out of hospitals, in his studio sat a portrait of me. He was itching to get back home to Milford to finish it.
I first saw the oil painting in October of 2022, when I flew up from Baltimore to see him after he became ill. What struck me was the photo he was working from. It was me as a young boy from the shoulders up, shirtless, standing in our rickety barn in Clove Valley, New York. The same barn where Dad would later paint his acclaimed
Jaws and The Empire Strikes Back movie posters from his upstairs studio.
Dad had taken this photo of me, circa 1970something. It was a hell of a photo. There I was, standing in the barn, sunlight bathing half my face. I didn’t recall seeing the photo before, or posing for it.
But even if I hadn’t been the focus, the photo would’ve grabbed my attention. There was something about my facial expression. Not happy, not sad, but pensive. I could swear that child was unusually meditative for someone that young. That
wasn’t my childhood, was it? Had it been a trick of the camera, or had Dad caught something in me I wasn’t aware of ? It was both off-putting and remarkable to see this image after all these years.
We had talked about the portrait. “I can’t get the face right,” he told me. Where the light fell across my face, he could not get it to translate the way he wanted on canvas. This would drive any artist crazy, and certainly one with my father’s skill.
Four years earlier, I had written a magazine retrospective of my father’s career, “The Art of Roger Kastel.” I’d stepped into his studio with its bright fluorescent lighting, perpetual smell of turpentine, blobs of paint smeared on a pallet, and paintbrushes of every size imaginable standing bristles-up in an old coffee can. It was his happy space, where a visitor could sense the joy. I marveled at his recent work. Then age 88, he hadn’t lost his fastball.
In his final months, in between extended hospital stays and never-ending medical examinations, on the rare days he could muster the strength, he would valiantly descend the stairs to his studio, a Herculean feat in itself, and pick up his brush to give it another try.
Until the very end, Dad followed his passion, no matter the obstacles. And to me, that’s what art is — man’s passion laid out on canvas, for the entire world to see. My portrait may never have gotten done to the artist’s satisfaction, but I’ll always cherish it, along with the man whose lifelong journey was one of joy, love, and kindness — a trip he generously took with us, his family, by his side.