Marty Garcia is immortalizing 1,000 people in Chicago one at a time, in oil pastel on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of bristol board. “Every Sunday I call 20 to 40 people to schedule as many as ten in one week,” says Garcia, 26, who fits his hour-and-a-half sessions between shifts as a part-time stock clerk at Dominick’s. “I’ve asked customers,” he says, and he sneaked in one sitting with a coworker in the store’s break room. He recently turned up for an appointment to find his subject’s neighbor had locked himself out of his apartment. So Garcia helped the neighbor take apart a window and then did his portrait, too.
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Garcia asks his sitters to pose in their natural environments and do whatever they want while he works. Urganus fixed herself a salad. Turned out Garcia has done portraits of some jazz musicians she knows. This was not her first portrait; one year at DePaul a caricaturist did a sketch of her. It’s still packed in a box from her last move.
“That will be my last one in the series, number 1,000,” he answered.
Garcia grew up near what real estate agents now call Roscoe Village. “Everybody knew each other,” Garcia says. “People on the next block always had a block party. I haven’t been invited to a block party in I don’t know how long. They don’t have them anymore. So I’m trying to create a community together of people I’ve done portraits of.” He keeps his portraits simple by omitting any background detail. As soon as he finishes a portrait, he signs it and tears the sheet from his sketch pad, then hands it to his host. It’s free. He leaves with his drawing pad, his nubby pastels, and the water bottle that he brings to every session. “The idea is generally Taoist in nature,” he once wrote in a grant application. “When something is created, it should be left to grow.” He plans to revisit every portrait and photograph it wherever its subject has placed it. If they’ve tossed it, he’ll photograph the Dumpster in the alley behind their apartment building.
