He knows equal time is too much to hope for, but painter Robert Proce has been devoting himself recently to shifting the spotlight away from youth culture and showing artistic respect for seniors.
You can see the results for yourself in his one-man show “Over Fifty: The Portrait Series” featuring likenesses of 47 subjects aged 50 to 102 through July 5 at the Oak Park Arms retirement community.
“It’s my little statement,” said Proce, 75, who took up painting full time after he and his wife Joyce retired from their Razzle Dazzle Costumes shop in Oak Park. “Everybody’s focused on youth. Everyone’s obsessed with 20-somethings. So I decided to give some attention to people my age. I call it profiling the art of aging in America.”
Proce means literal profiling, since all but a few of his small, typically 5×7 inch, acrylic portraits are side views — mostly facing together in one direction on the walls of the Oak Park Arms’ Narrow Gallery. But he’s also referring to capturing the character and life experience of his peers.
His “Over Fifty” project began in 2010 after he happened to paint a few portraits in a row of friends in his age group and decided to turn them into a series. And then decided to turn the series into a collection of 100, today 65 of them are complete.
“I like painting an aged face,” said Proce, who admitted with a laugh to an artistic fondness for wrinkles. “They show a lot of character. The people in these portraits have lived. They’ve done things. Their faces are like a map of their lives.”
Proce also admitted that being a painter is a lifelong dream, having gone to art school as a young man before work and family took precedence. And that he’s doing his best now to make up for lost time, with three solo shows and more than 70 group shows to his credit.
“There is such a thing as life as life after retirement,” he said. “I’m proof. You just have to find something you want to do and work at it. I like to share that with seniors.”
Which is a fair exchange, considering how much his subjects have shared with him about their own lives.
“The best thing about this whole process has been hearing the stories these people have told me about their lives,” Proce said. “Some of these people are 80 or 90 years old and they told me what it was like to live through the Great Depression. Amazing things. I got to know them all pretty well and I was glad I had the opportunity. That’s been really, really rewarding.”
‘Over Fifty: The Portrait Series’
Through July 5
Oak Park Arms, 408 S. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park
Admission is free.
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(708) 386-4040; http://www.oakparkarms.com