Speaking of Raphael Soyer and his depiction(s) of Allen, one sometime-pupil, the talented artist Mike Boyle also drew the poet and has stories to tell:
This, from back, in May of 2008, looking back – “Drawing Allen Ginsberg”
“I remember sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, early in 1986, paging through a book on painter Raphael Soyer. In it was his Homage to Thomas Eakins, a 1960s painting that represents Soyer and his circle of friends – painters who shared a deep admiration for the 19th century American artist.
Interestingly, one of the artists included in the painting was Edward Hopper, who also sat for a preparatory study for Soyer’s homage to Eakins – a testimony to Hopper’s close friendship with Soyer. This meant something to me because when I was maybe six years old, within the pages of my family’s new set of Encyclopedia Britannica, I saw Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks for the first time. His painting captivated me. I didn’t understand it then, but I suspect it was his masterful sense of design and his ability to make you feel what he felt about the mystery of night and people that reeled me in. For a kid growing up in small town Upper Michigan, Hopper’s portrayal of life in the big city was wonderful.
So here I was, 32 years old, in New York – Hopper’s city, in my first semester of graduate school at Brooklyn College, where I was studying with Lennart Anderson, Philip Pearlstein, Lois Dodd and Allen D’Arcangelo. They were all great teachers. I absorbed as much as I could of their teaching, listened to their points of view, and struggled to find myself in my own work.
Near the end of the first year of work on my MFA, in December of 1986, I found myself employed as a tutor in the English Skills Lab at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. When my boss, Doris Sinatro mentioned that she was studying with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College, I remembered another painting from the book on Raphael Soyer. It was a portrait that Soyer painted of a young, bohemian looking Allen Ginsberg – I think from the 1950s. Immediately, I thought it would be great to meet with Ginsberg to draw his portrait, to somehow connect with the past – Hopper’s generation, that I was so interested in.
Through Doris Sinatro, Ginsberg agreed to pose for me, a meeting time and place was arranged: the afternoon of December 15th, in a small conference room on the Brooklyn College campus, where he taught his class. When I told Lennart Anderson that I would be drawing Ginsberg, he was enthusiastic about the idea of doing a portrait of somebody that is well known – to see if one could get a good likeness that could be confirmed by others.
On the day of our meeting, I arrived early. The door was open and Ginsberg was alone, sitting with his back to me at the end of a long conference table, writing. I decided to sit on the floor in the quiet hallway and drew him through the doorway – a back view of him writing. When I finished, I walked in and introduced myself. He told me that I would have to draw him as he worked, which was fine with me. After a second drawing – a profile view of him sitting in a chair, his small class of graduate students arrived and sat at the opposite end of the table. I drew two more portraits throughout the afternoon: one of Ginsberg deep in thought, resting his chin in his hand, the other of him, also sitting, but animated in conversation with his class. All of the drawings were executed in brush and ink, a medium that I had become comfortable working in during my last semester of Figure Drawing with Ron Weaver at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
During the drawing session, one of his students mentioned that Ginsberg was the subject of a lot of media attention as of late. He had recently been featured on the cover of a national news magazine, and the assumption by the student was that the only reason I was there was because of the attention Ginsberg was currently receiving. What he didn’t know, was that my purpose for the drawing session was to connect with the art historical past – a generation of artists who continue to interest and delight me, even today.
Unknown to me at the time, Raphael Soyer was still living in New York City when I drew my Ginsberg portraits. He died in his home, of cancer, less than a year later at the age of 87. The Washington Post, in their obituary of Soyer, called him the “dean of American realists”. As for my intrigue with Hopper, I revisited his building on Washington Square in early July, 2006. Sitting on his front steps – as I did in the summer of ’88, before leaving New York – and gazing up to his studio window on the top floor, a flood of memories swept over me, all stemming from that day I first encountered Hopper in Nighthawks, as a child growing up in Michigan, many years ago.”