Harry’s Portrait Artwork by Todd Hale

Written By Hofheimer Building

If you’ve visited Harry’s at Hofheimer or seen photos online, you’ve definitely taken sight of the creative and unique portrait artwork hanging on the walls of the Harry’s intimate restaurant setting.

THE ARTIST
The master behind Harry’s art is Todd Hale, a renowned and well respected artist located in Richmond, VA. Read more below about the journey and Todd’s story.

HARRY’S PORTRAIT NAMES
Whether you’re visiting Harry’s right now, in the past, or in the near future, here is a list of names for the portraits. We won’t give away the answers. Instead, we encourage you to name as many as you can with your friends, then (if you must) Google search the rest. Good luck!

THE STORY + JOURNEY BEHIND THE ART
The process of producing the Harry’s portraits was challenging and interesting on many levels. Carter and Todd connected about the artwork for the new restaurant concept in February 2023 and came up with the idea to create portraits of famous people named “Harry” for the new restaurant. From there, they began compiling a list of potential names. There were some obvious choices right out of the gate, but then it got a little harder. Todd really enjoyed the ability to stretch "the rules" a little bit to include Debbie Harry, for instance. Carter suggested he reference a 2016 series of collage portraits that Todd had made which were comprised of reconfigured found imagery compiled from the internet. This process was in a way precursor to the way the artist would approach the Harry portraits using artificial intelligence. The initial challenge of the project was how to marry the ideas of recognizability with a sense of abstraction and novelty. Todd and Carter wanted the portraits to be seen as who they were, while also being able to stand alone, even if you didn't know who the person was. At the time, Todd was just beginning to explore working with AI, specifically Midjourney. It seemed like a natural direction to investigate for this project, partly because he was not interested in showcasing traditional rendering of the models or subjects. In other words as Todd states, “I didn’t want the pieces to be about my marks, my hand, or me. This is of course, one of the major criticisms of artificial intelligence: that it lacks the human sensibility of a creator. Ironically that separateness from intention is what interested me the most about making these portraits. The series is composed from multiple AI generated images which have then been layered and composited. Each piece is ultimately a collage of these AI elements, hand drawn passages and found photos, ultimately produced as a singular collage/photo-montage on canvas.”

As Todd began the actual artwork, he started roughing out images based on word, as well as image prompts, sometimes using existing photos of the subjects. He found the AI to be a bit like rolling dice, as the same prompt entered the exact same way will give you sometimes very different results.

Todd explains, “I feel lucky that I have had a career of manipulating photos both through applications like Photoshop as well as old fashioned collage techniques prior to working with AI. Therefore, being introduced to this new tool at this point in my life felt like a natural extension of my work, a complimentary tool rather than an end unto itself. Through trial and error, the AI tends to give you interesting results along with glaring anomalies that need to be fixed. In a sense I felt like a forensic artist, distilling the subject's multi-faceted essence into a singular form. With Harriet Tubman, for instance, I used the only existing photographs of her and fed them in as image prompts for a starting point . She started to emerge as an idealized, enhanced, and maybe modern version of herself, but the likeness was not there. I was an able to lay the new AI generated images on top of her real photos and adjust them to match her actual bone structure. Seeing her likeness come into focus was fascinating. The process felt like I was assembling and curating a process born out of the collective unconscious of a crowd sourced idea of who someone is. I generated close to 1000 images from which I was able to distill the final 14 Harry portraits. Contrary to the current criticism of AI, the process did not feel like a shortcut. The new procedures created a new type of complex workflow that often demanded more time rather than less. That allowed me to look at things through the perspective of a sound engineer with both hands on the soundboard and two more hands simultaneously making the music in real time. Artificial intelligence is controversial in all of culture, but especially in art where its new footprint can be directly seen. I understand the fears and anxiety, however, I look at it as just another tool. Like a synthesizer it involves reacting to and making choices in a conversation between man and machine that I’m fascinated with. The fortuitous randomness of working with AI feels familiar and reminds me of the feeling of chasing paint around a canvas. Embracing this element of chance has long been a focus of contemporary art and definitely a consistent theme in my work. I’m interested in communing with the elusive idea of "the muse" whatever that may be. The process of working with the AI on these portraits felt like a type of digital séance with the muse and the spirits of the subjects, a type of computer enhanced alchemy. The images I collaborated with "it" on are interesting to me because they are never before seen images of people that in some cases have passed on. I felt like one of the apes in the movie 2001, scampering up to touch to the black monolith of knowledge, only to run away and return, fully under the spell of the mystery.”

For more information about Todd Hale, including his artwork, visit www.toddhale.com.

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