Looks Count in Bachardy Faces

“When I sat for Don [Bachardy], I never had any doubt he would ‘get’ me,” recalls Guy Dill. “It was more about which me he would get.”

John Rose remembers how Bachardy starts with his sitter’s eyes “and then, like a ravenous termite, bores into your soul, eating away at all the lines, pores and wrinkles.”

“Hellish” is the way Claudia Parducci describes the hours of lying motionless--and, in her case, nude--while Bachardy had his painterly way with her.

Not that any of these artists is really complaining.

For nearly four decades, they and their colleagues have clamored to sit for Bachardy, who renders his deft physical descriptions with a bravura sense of color, form and texture.

Nearly 100 of his portraits of famous and obscure artists nudge one another on the tightly packed walls of a gallery at the Laguna Art Museum. This zestful show of works, largely from Bachardy’s private collection, rekindles one’s enjoyment of paint and personalities in nearly equal measure.

Brief reminiscences on gallery labels about posing for Bachardy invite viewers into this charmed circle. Unfortunately, the labels lack identifying information about these people, many of whom are little-known.

Sitting motionless for hours probably would give most people a slack, pensive or gloomy expression. But Bachardy seems to find his sitters’ real selves in their immobilized repose.

While the early pencil portraits are scrupulously observed--Berlant’s likeness captures the slightly crooked set of Berlant’s jaw and the spatulate pads of his earlobes--Bachardy’s swashbuckling style makes the painted portraits especially memorable.

Blueness bleeds out of Carole Caroompas’ eyes in a watercolor from 1977. Framed by the crisp silhouette of her pageboy and the stiff white material of a sleeveless blouse, her young face is a sweet blur. One corner of her upper lip lifts up slightly, giving her a petulant air.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Bachardy’s style became ever freer. He turned Mary Corse’s blond hair into a maelstrom of choppy yellow strokes and splashed her face with peachy zigzags. Her eyes--white orbs zapped with little blue Xs--and her slightly parted lips add to this picture of sunny animation.

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Karen Carson, seen in tight close-up, blazes with a nearly demonic ferocity, the black pupils of her eyes pierced by tiny windows of white light. Laddie John Dill’s round, jowly face has a preternatural ruddy glow, as if a candle burned just behind his skin.

The men are a rich gallery of types, from skittish-looking Patrick Morrison (his mismatched eyebrows look like bits of Morse code over eyes rimmed in fuchsia) to the abstracted calm of Richard Diebenkorn. Several of the men pose in the nude, their body hair in surprising hues of orange or blue.

While many of Bachardy’s sitters are young, particularly in work from the ‘60s and ‘70s, in recent years he clearly has relished exploring the weathered terrain of older faces--including his own angular, thin-lipped visage, which has the burning intensity of an ancient Etruscan funeral portrait.

Bachardy’s brush locates every age line radiating from the mouth of pink-cheeked painter Olga Seem, who says that sitting for Bachardy “is to observe one’s vanity escape through the picture window.”

The keenness of the portraits are on par with the word portraits of people in Bachardy’s diaries (portions of which were published in The Times’ Book Review two years ago).

Meeting author Carson McCullers in 1955, he was struck by her pale face “with lavender circles around her wet-dark puppy-dog eyes” and her “hanging cheeks, like swollen jowls.”

According to guest curator Penny Little Hawks, “most everyone” who posed for Bachardy was a guest at the legendary dinner parties he gave with his longtime lover, novelist Christopher Isherwood, who died in 1986.

At Isherwood’s urging, Bachardy had studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late ‘50s, where he met Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and other soon-to-be luminaries of the local art world.

Asked to do a set of drawings to be used as stage props for Tony Richardson’s Los Angeles staging of “A Taste of Honey” in 1960, Bachardy so impressed the director that he was asked to draw the cast. When the show moved to Broadway, the portraits were displayed in the theater lobby--Bachardy’s first show.

But the great flow of portraits didn’t begin until 1970, when art dealer Irvine Blum suggested a show of drawings of contemporary artists.

And so began the ritual (described in this show by Tom Wudl) of small talk, coffee and then “the torture”--torture so exquisitely worthwhile that whenever Wudl now hears of some other artist sitting for Bachardy, he says, “I feel unimportant and left out.”

* “Don Bachardy: Four Decades of Los Angeles Artists,” through April 11 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. $5 general, $4 students and seniors, free for children younger than 12 and for everyone on the first Thursday of every month from 5 to 9 p.m. (949) 494-6531.