Billy Pappas spent nearly 8 1/2 years on one drawing. He knows about obsession.
"I can't just be an artist with modest success," he says about halfway through Waiting for Hockney, a documentary showing at this weekend's Maryland Film Festival, chronicling the near-decade he spent trying to commit a single image of Marilyn Monroe to paper. "I've got to be Michelangelo."
How well Pappas compares to Michelangelo is for others, and for posterity, to decide. But Waiting for Hockney certainly paints a portrait of an artist with a singular, unique vision, and Pappas was willing to endure almost anything to realize it.
To its great credit, director Julie Checkoway's film goes beyond the creative process. Its title refers to Pappas' quest for an audience with artist and art theorist David Hockney, who has spent years thinking and writing about art's ability to reflect reality. In the film, Pappas views an audience with Hockney as his grail, as the thing that will give him, and his Marilyn, instant credibility. To put it in terms the real Marilyn would have understood, meeting Hockney would make Billy Pappas a star.
Says Checkoway, a former English teacher at Gilman School now working as an arts reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, "I wanted to find out, what would convince someone to devote himself so profoundly and without reservation to a cause that might or might not yield the result that he wished."
A native New Yorker, Pappas, 40, moved to the Baltimore area at age 9. The second child of loving parents who continue to support his dream of setting the art world on its ear (even if they admit to being befuddled by it occasionally), he is no raving lunatic with a pencil in his hand and a faraway look in his eyes, oblivious to everything but his own talent and mission. Personable if intense, he relishes talking about the challenge he took on, and stands back like a proud father whenever his Marilyn is being viewed.
It's a good thing he allows the viewer space, too, because his work does not lend itself to casual inspection. Extraordinarily detailed, each hair, each skin pore painstakingly captured, his drawing -- and drawing seems like such a weak description of what Pappas has produced -- seems almost three-dimensional. It's reality replicated, reproduced in a way that may truly be the next best thing to being there.
