Andrew Nellis is a good friend of mine. When I was 28 and living in student residence, he stayed with me for a few weeks in my single room. It was cramped, we were bored, and we suffered through the tail end of ICE STORM 98. Boy, that was fun. The power was out a lot, it was dark, and we were surrounded by 19 year old kids who wanted to get drunk and have sex.

When the lights came back on, Andrew asked me to do a portrait of him. I agreed. He then scrunched up his face in the most horrible way, reducing one of his eyes to a terrifying squint. He sat that way for two hours while I captured his likeness on newsprint. (Yeah, I had a thing for newsprint back then.)

When the portrait was done, Andrew admitted that his face hurt a great deal. He examined his likeness suspiciously. He asked me why his hair was flowing off the side of the page. I told him it just was. Why did he have huge lips, "like a black man"? I told him it wasn't my fault. Why were his nostrils were so big. That's the way they look when I'm sitting on the floor, staring up at you.

Do you suppose Modigliani had to go through this kind of questioning?

"Why's my neck so long? Why are my eyes filled in? Why do I have a head shaped like an almond?"

But after time, Andrew learned to love my portrait, and has actually shown this photograph to others. It remains one of my favorite portraits, being the first one I ever did with a live model.