What I Believe: Dick Budig
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
The artist ends with the eyes.
He begins from the outside of the canvas and works his way in, to the sharp lines of the subject’s eyes. He spends most of his time on the eyes.
This boy’s are brown.
Related Media
Audio Slideshow: I Believe
I Believe is a seven day series featuring the beliefs of Lincoln locals. (Heidi Hoffman / JournalStar.com)...
They’ve smiled back at him for days now, eye level on the wooden easel before him. The portrait, just hours from being finished, shows the boy at three stages of life: a curly-haired toddler in overalls, a senior in his Lincoln Southeast High School Class of ’95 picture, a sailor in the U.S. Navy.
“I bet he was a fun little kid, that little face of his is great. All lit up. I bet he was lit up all his life,” Dick Budig says, taking a break from painting the boy in his basement studio in the Haymarket. “And that high school picture — I bet 30 high school girls fainted when they got his wallet-size picture.”
He laughs.
“He was a handsome young guy, wasn’t he?”
David Moreno of Gering was killed in Iraq in 2003 by friendly fire. He’s one of the dozen of dead military members the artist has painted, mailing the portraits to their mothers in wooden boxes.
To begin, he asks the mothers to send photos. Some are poor quality, which makes it hard for him to make out details of the faces. But using Photoshop on the photos, he resurrects them.
An art instructor used to tell him that getting a likeness is simple, just put something on a canvas and it’ll look like that person. The hard part is making it feel real.
Do the eyes right, it feels real.
“For some reason, when I start getting really serious about the eyes, I can see the whole thing come together and come to life. Then there’s a part I call ‘turning on the light,’ when I do the iris and the pupil and I put that highlight in. It’s like turning on a light. The eyes light up. I wait days and days to do it, and it’s the most fun I have.”
He paints less important lines fuzzy so they fade back, maybe a shoulder line or a curl. He paints the lines in the eyes sharp so they stand out.
He wants people to be drawn to their young eyes: Travis Ford, Chris Swisher, Nick Nolte, Linda Tarango-Griess ...
The artist is 70. He and his first wife lost a son at birth. The pain still haunts him. He can’t imagine the pain of the mothers who raised sons and daughters to be killed so far from home.
One day, he phoned a mother to ask her the color of her son’s eyes. It was hard to tell from the photo. She told him she knew the color, but just couldn’t say it.
He does this for them, for free. Just mail me back the box if you can.
But maybe, more than that, he says, maybe this is selfish of him. Maybe it’s a way to give him something to do now that he’s retired, to make him feel like he’s doing some small good in the world. Or maybe he does it because he’s an artist and this is a way to explore a side of him he’s never felt: Believing in something so much you’d die for it.
He sees it in their eyes.
“When those eyes start to develop, when I really begin to work on them and develop the eyes ... there’s a moment there...”
He pauses, chin trembling. He wipes his hazel eyes.
“There’s a moment when they start looking back at you.”
Colleen Kenney is on leave. Reach her editors at 473-7306 or citydesk@journalstar.com
Post Your Comment
Standards and RulesYour posted comment will appear after it has been approved.
Frequently asked questions about story commenting.