Blog / 2025 / “This Is William Hurt, the Actor.”

I’d just slammed shut the hatch on my mom’s station wagon, closing in a stack of large paintings that, until moments before, had been on display at a fancy eyewear store that also served as an exhibition space. I’d need to drive the artwork to my place and then go across town to return the car to my parents before taking a train and a bus back home.

My phone rang. This was twenty years ago and cell phones weren’t quite the spam target they’ve become today, so, even though I didn’t recognize the number, I picked up.

“Hi Gwenn, this is William Hurt, the actor.”

The greeting was surprising, but not completely unexpected. Hurt floated in and out of the theater scene in Portland, starring in productions at one of Oregon’s better known playhouses where the director was an old friend of his from pre-Hollywood days. Still, why was the Oscar-winning actor calling me?

It turned out this was one of those moments when the exact opposite of what you think should be happening is what actually happens, giving you the opportunity to choose again to be yourself.

I’d been a professional portrait painter ever since earning my BA two years and two months prior. In that time I’d painted people, and that is all. I was exclusively a portraitist even though most art world gatekeepers viewed my genre as nothing more than vanity art for wealthy patrons.

It didn’t matter that at that time I was putting together a collection of portraits of death workers, including everyone from a pediatric oncology nurse and a young veteran who’d seen combat to a forensic pathologist and the lead author of Oregon’s assisted suicide law. I was painting people, and my focus was on real individuals—not made-up ones. I’d portrayed a hundred or so people so far, and, with this one exception, they were all individuals I’d interviewed and photograph myself.

I’d made a hard stand on this, eschewing the lucrative track of painting celebrity portraits from other people’s pictures of them, while still managing to make a living painting what I considered true portraits. That is: images of people that were more than a surface representation.

And now here was a world-famous actor commissioning me to paint his portrait.

The night before, Hurt had seen a series of promotional images I’d made for Stark Raving Theatre’s 2004-2005 season. The original paintings were all portraits of people I knew, with something extra going on in the background—references to the plays that their faces were meant to promote. The works were hanging in the theater’s lobby, and Hurt had noticed them while taking in a show.

His phone call launched a surreal interlude in my life. We met up at a park where we conducted the portrait photo-session and interview surrounded by covertly curious onlookers, and then we attended a theater festival together. In the lobby waiting for the next show to start, the city’s art scene—a group who’d uniformly not had the time of day for the unapologetically ambitious 24 year old who only painted people—was all smiles, intrigued by my famous friend.

Dodging the fawning eye contact of these newly solicitous faces, I concentrated instead on the Academy Award winner, whose mouth had suddenly hardened into a line. I obviously wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the looks we were getting. Hurt told me he was fine with me sharing the portrait I painted of him on my site, but he asked me not to use his name to make myself famous.

I agreed readily. I understood everybody’s fascination with a figure they’d seen on screen and who was now in the same room as them, but I didn’t love how they were staring, for Hurt’s sake but also for my own. I hated the idea that everything I’d been working towards—it felt like a lot, even though I’d only been at it for 26 months—could be overshadowed by this one client’s international stardom, so it was easy to treat him like any other art patron.

Well, mostly.

The next day, I raced back from my local grocery store, clutching the 72 precious pictures I’d taken of Hurt, which were nestled in the one-hour photo envelopes that ruled my artistic life in the era before digital cameras. I laid out the images in a 9 by 8 grid on the floor of my studio, which was also my bedroom in a house I shared with my brother and some friends. Moving the photos around, I juxtaposed them and evaluated them, making discard stacks and then going back through them to make sure there was nothing in those pics that I needed.

This much was the same as what I’d do with any client, though I never went to a theater festival with another patron and I usually took only half as many photos over the course of the interview. In the end, there were three images of Hurt that spoke to me, each revealing a different face of the actor. I decided to paint all of them.

Though I worked on the three canvases at the same time, moving from one to the other whenever a particular piece was too wet to paint on, this is the first one I finished. I loved the delicacy and wistfulness of the actor’s face, so contrary to the outsized and sometimes-charming often-brusque man he was.

It pleased me to shatter the public image of this actor with this painting, and I liked to imagine it represented a part of him that he felt unable to fully express in his celebrity life.

This is the second portrait I finished. It’s the officially commissioned piece.

It reflects most accurately what I had concluded that the star believed about himself. That’ always been my goal with my portraits—not this one of course, but 99% of them are about confirming a subject’s self-mythology. I want to make a painting that’s like a mirror that always reflects the best of a person back to them, helping them to center themselves whenever they look at the piece.

This is the third and final painting of Hurt that I made, and it depicts the actor’s volatility. He was friendly, if rather self-involved, and then, abruptly, he was neither, directing all his attention at me and snapping at something I said.

For example, at one point during the portrait interview, I casually referred to “capturing a likeness” and the actor’s face clouded over.

“You should be careful about the sort of words you use,” he barked.

Apparently, the person whose very name means “injury” thought the word “capture” was aggressive.

For twenty years, I kept quiet about the identity of these portraits’ subject. I published the first two images on my site, here and here, but I titled them as if they were likenesses of one Guillaume Carambolage. It was a pseudonym I concocted based on having chatted with Hurt in French. Guillaume is William en français, and “carambolage” is the word for a many car pile-up, fitting since when you say Hurt’s name in French it sounds like the word for collision.

I didn’t use Hurt to make myself famous, but it feels right to honor this work fully today, on my artiversary, 22 years almost to the day since my art career started and two decades since the Academy Award winner called me up. It feels right because I’m finally ready to make the change that I so adamantly denied back when I met Hurt.

The shift started at the end of March, when I was commissioned by Garden State Equality to draw Babs Siperstein, a trans rights activist from New Jersey, for a sticker pack celebrating two decades of fighting for equality.

This portrait made me see that I can actually do it: I can make a likeness of an individual I don’t know personally. More importantly, Babs’ portrait made me see that sometimes it’s worth it to break one of the main rules that has defined my career.

A week later, I found myself painting Kilmar Abrego Garcia for a protest poster.

Soon after that, my brush was looking for Rümeysa Öztürk’s likeness, and this was starting to feel like a habit.

Before this year, the only famous people I’d painted besides William Hurt were one particularly unsavory reality TV star and all his mean friends and one of my heroes, but now I want to make a whole series of paintings of people I can’t meet.

I’d like to paint portraits of people from American history that the Trump administration is trying to erase—individuals like Fannie Lou Hamer and Marsha P Johnson—and display them along with a brief but powerful anecdote about them which will hopefully make viewers want to learn more.

To do all this, I’d like your help.

Please send me suggestions of people who you want to see painted. The only requirements are that the subject must have played a vital and often overlooked role in US history and that they are no longer alive.

For this and for the 22 years you’ve helped me to be a full-time artist, you have my forever gratitude. Despite what the cliché of the artist’s life would have us believe, a painter doesn’t need a wealthy celebrity client in order to make a life with their art. Rather, my creativity thrives when I’m in conversation with people who believe that art can be both pretty and deeply meaningful.

Thank you.