Z•E•S•TFOR LIVING 9/11 victims: Who they were, not how they died

Z•E•S•TFOR LIVING
9/11 victims: Who they were, not how they died
Sketch artist creates
portraits for those
who lost loved ones
By gloria stravelli
Staff Writer

JERRY WOLKOWITZ Nancy Gawron uses a sepia pencil to create a portrait of Santos Valentine, a NYPD Emergency Services officer whose friend requested the portrait.

The photographs show them in the prime of their lives — celebrating at weddings, posing proudly in uniforms, smiling contentedly within the circle of their families.

Nancy Gawron looks into the faces of the husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends who perished in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and on Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001 and sees people who were living life to the fullest.

"Almost every photo I get is at the best time of their lives, because that’s how the family wants to remember them," said Gawron, who has taken on the awesome task of sketching portraits of victims of 9/11 for anyone who asks.

"It’s always at their happiest time," observed Gawron, a portraitist known for her colored-pencil portraits. "I just got one of a man on a horse. He loved to ride, and that’s the way they wanted to remember him."

Gawron was fortunate: Her husband and son, both of whom work in Manhattan, were unscathed by the attacks. But she shares with the victims’ families the common experience of having waited for word following the disaster.

"The main reason I got into this is that…I lost contact with them for several hours," she recounted. "I was in the same position at that point as the rest of the families. I experienced the same kind of panic that everyone else did.

"As far as deciding to do this, I was just like everybody else; I wanted to do something," she explained. "I’m an artist, and this is what I wanted to do. I feel as if I am a part of the healing process."

At first, commissions came through word of mouth and notices she posted. She mailed flyers to the families of the 33 Middletown victims and contacted Cantor Fitzgerald (the firm lost 658 employees in the attacks), which posted her offer on its Web site.

She completes one portrait each day, working five days a week.

"I began doing the portraits two to three weeks after 9/11, and I’ve been doing them since. I get two to three calls a day from all parts of the country. The requests are now up to 300," said Gawron, who has already completed 186 colored-pencil portraits.

"This is a long-term commitment," the Red Bank artist noted. "A friend figured out that at a portrait a day, potentially doing 3,000 people — that’s 10 years."

She caught up twice, but the number of requests has increased with the notoriety that has come with news articles and TV appearances such as a segment on her posthumous portraits on 48 Hours on CBS.

Not unexpectedly, most of the requests come from wives.

"The largest percentage of victims were males in their prime, generally between 20 and 35 years old," she observed. "That was the biggest surprise to me. The whole group was so young."

Early on, callers were local; now she often gets e-mails from far off. Most want to share their stories.

"I found that part of the gift is listening to the story," she explained. "They want to tell it again — to say where he was, whether they got a phone call. So sometimes the phone calls take a while. I just feel that’s part of the gift."

Gawron has set no time limit on her project.

"I will do this for as long as [requests] come in," she said. "To me, it would be penalizing the families that take longer to heal. Some are ready to deal with it right away; some aren’t."

Besides portraits of individual victims, Gawron fills requests for couples and for family portraits — some that depict families that will never be.

"One hundred twenty-four babies have been born since 9/11," she said. "In a lot of cases, I’m creating a family portrait because they’ll never have one."

For the composites, Gawron asks for several photos to help her create a cohesive grouping.

"I have to try to figure a way to combine them so they work," she said.

Gawron manages to do so by copying and adjusting the size of images, and in a few cases, she has even managed to place a lost father’s arm around a child he never had the chance to embrace in life.

To streamline the process, Gawron begins by putting the photos in an opaque projector and sketching the outline projected onto a mat board.

She lightly sketches the outline in pencil and then begins filling in details, using pencils in two tones of sepia and white that give the portraits a vintage look and simplify her work since skin, hair and eye color are the same in each.

Her starting point is always the eyes.

"Once I have the person in the portrait looking back at me, then the portrait is alive," she explained. "The person I’m trying to capture is in it. Then it feels like I’m just filling in the rest."

Undaunted by the task before her, Gawron begins each weekday in the same manner.

"I get up, have breakfast and go to ship the portrait from the day before," she explained.

Gawron’s packager gives her a special flat rate for shipping, and that is the only cost to survivors for her portraits.

When she returns, she begins the portrait she will work on that day.

"I have just turned it into a spiritual exercise for myself," she explained. "When I start a portrait, I call the person by name. I ask for their assistance. At the end, I thank them for any help they gave me.

"When I call on the person, there are times the portrait changes a bit," she confided. "I’ve learned to trust it and let it go wherever it’s going. I’ve had enough feedback. I’ll get a note from a family that I’ve exactly captured the expression in their eyes."

Gawron compiled a scrapbook of the portraits to show to families and found that the book has helped put a human face on a tragedy of immense proportions.

"Originally it was for the families," she explained, "but it’s had a role and impact far beyond that.

"It’s a very strong reaction people have when looking at it," she added. "It forces them to get out of the mindset that this was just a large number of people. They have to look into individual faces of people. I have found it changes their view of the whole thing."

The project means Gawron spends long hours each day at the drawing table in her upstairs studio, getting little exercise and leaving no time for favorite pursuits like gardening, but she senses her destiny in the work she is doing.

"When I look back, part of me believes this is what I came to the planet to do. I’ve been preparing for a very long time," she said. "There are all these things that had to fall into place to make me able to do this."

Chief among these is her ability to work quickly, honed as a commercial artist with a New York advertising agency where working on tight deadlines was routine.

Gawron also developed the sepia technique she uses for the portraits 20 years ago. Although it didn’t have a commercial application, she liked it and kept using it.

Two years ago, she mounted "We Are All One," an exhibit of 65 multicultural portraits.

"That was part of the preparation for this," she said. "At the time, I was doing a lot of spiritual study. The whole focus of that show was really part of what I’m doing now."

Gawron’s own spiritual belief in an afterlife also factors in.

"I don’t see them as gone, so it allows me to do what I’m doing," she said.

"I have a mental image of the whole bunch of them," she added. "When I call them by name, they sort of step forward and help me. I couldn’t do this project without that belief. It would be overwhelming."

Gawron said she never finds the work depressing.

"I feel very privileged," she said. "My focus and reward is with the families. I get these absolutely gorgeous thank-you notes every day in the mail and [via] e-mail. How could you possibly be down? The families are unbelievably appreciative.

"One woman told me that she hung the portrait in her 5-year-old’s room and that her daughter laughed when she saw it because her father always made her laugh," she recounted. "How can you measure that?

"Women who’ve had babies since — how can you measure being able to give that to them? They say to me, ‘Now I know what we would have looked like.’ There’s no way I could be down," she explained.

"I wouldn’t change a moment of it," Gawron said. "It’s an unbelievable experience."