The art of painting powerful people

Ellen Cooper has spent days preparing to paint former state House speaker Bryan Cutler’s official portrait. Before putting brush to canvas, she toured the Capitol with the Lancaster County Republican, gathering the kinds of visual reference material — posture, countenance, accessories — that goes unnoticed by most.

When finished, the piece will be added to a Harrisburg gallery of faces spanning hundreds of years. It will also join Cooper’s growing catalog, which includes some of Pennsylvania’s most powerful — if not instantly recognizable — people. 

Cooper, a Temple grad from Delaware County, painted the official portrait of former state House speaker Samuel H. Smith and a posthumous portrait, commissioned by former First Lady Susan Corbett, of Pennsylvania’s first and so far only female governor, Hannah Penn. She’s also painted judges, CEOs, doctors, university leaders, and a former governor of Massachusetts.

Cooper spoke with PA Local about finding faces in the crowd, immortalizing her muses, and why she thinks painted portraits persist in an age of Instagram and livestreams.

The conversation has been edited for clarity, flow, and length.

What’s the hardest part of a person to paint? 

Hands are challenging, but they're not the hardest part. I guess that would be finessing facial features and the sense of light on those features because little differences are noticeable to people. We're all experts on the human face.

Where do you start?

Everybody looks different from each other, of course, and it all boils down to shapes, sizes, and proportions. It's rather abstract. I'm looking at what the light is doing on the form, which is very specific to each situation and person. That's sort of the mechanical part. 

But the other part for me, what I love doing, is getting to know the people I paint. I do research about them. I interview them. Decisions get made about what happens in the portrait based on my understanding of them.

Has anyone ever been taken aback by their likeness? 

I haven't had that experience, in part because I guess I have a process of working with people, right?

All of the big decisions happen largely in collaboration. I don’t like surprises. I also do a paint study of the proposed portrait that I present to them so that they can respond. [Editor’s note: Think of a paint study as a first draft.]

Can you turn this off or do you walk into a grocery store and just see bone structure everywhere you turn?  

I think I can tune it up and tune it down a bit. I mean, the world is very alive to me and very, very interesting everywhere. I will say I'm constantly looking at the light, and how the light reveals whatever it is. So even in a grocery store, people are being revealed in grocery store lighting. And the individuals are just always so interesting to me — what they look like, how they age. I think people are just wonderful and fascinating.