Street Portraits

 Dianne Talan is a portrait artist of sorts, a painter of neighborhood characters. Though her subjects are made of bricks and mortar, not flesh and blood, she speaks of them as if they were people, and she wants their individuality to show through in her work.

“The windows are like eyes, and I see faces on the facades,” she says. “Some are beautiful and some are humorous. But they definitely have personalities.”

These are not just any buildings. They are her neighbors. Talan and her husband, the painter Dean Aronson, have lived and worked in their Chambers Street loft for 22 years, and every building on both sides of their block, between Greenwich Street and Hudson, has sat for her—so to speak. Joined together, her pictures compose the entire streetscape along both sides of that block.

So there will be some familiar faces in the show she is mounting this month. As part of the TOAST weekend in April (see article at right), Talan’s pictures will appear in the windows of the storefronts she has painted. She went door to door and sold her pictures to the proprietors of every ground floor business on the south side of the street.

“You wanna buy a hardware store?” asked Steve Stoppert, the manager of Tribeca Hardware, when Talan asked to speak to the owner.

“No, I want to sell a hardware store,” she replied. Talan said that Stoppert and most owners bought the paintings with little coaxing.

Talan’s paintings are based mostly on sketches done in the street. (“I don’t go out and take pictures because photographs would get in the way of my immediate response.”) She said she wants her feelings for the buildings to come through in her works, and hopes her pictures will help even longtime locals experience the block anew.

“Even though they’ve walked by those buildings a million times before,” said Talan, “maybe they will see them in a way that they’ve never seen them before.”