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Henry Allen digs around over by the staircase. He finally emerges with a colored pencil drawing of a head. No neck, no shoulders, just a head. The teeth are gritted in rage, and the eyes glance off to the right.
"See, if I would have added a neck and given him some body, it would have looked like a portrait," Allen explains.
"If you look in the beard here where there's both orange and red, you will see blue and green," the 68-year-old continues. "That's what makes the picture pop."
"Satyr," as Allen calls the head, is one of several colored pencil "facescapes" he keeps at his Takoma Park home. The house is about 100 years old, so the high ceilings in the living room provide plenty of space for landscapes, still lifes and more faces. On one wall, his daughter-in-law Abigail considers the world outside her window, shortly after she gave birth. Through an archway, son Nicholas oversees the dining room.
The sneer of "Satyr," which after a second take looks playful, belongs to Joel Garreau, a colleague of Allen's at the Washington Post's Style section since 1970.
"I look demonic," Garreau, 60, says via cell phone. "That doesn't bother me particularly. I kind of get off on that. I look like a wild man, and that's part of my personality."
Allen, who has tallied nearly four decades of service with Style, bunked with artists Bob Stark and Lucy Clark in a Connecticut Avenue loft shortly after his 30th birthday.
"We didn't have a proper bathroom," Clark recalls, "It was very rudimentary."
Allen joined the journalism game late because he took a Hemingway-esque route to get there. After dropping out of Hamilton College in upstate New York prior to his senior year, he joined the Marines and spent most of 1966 in Vietnam. A stint as a Washington correspondent for the New York Daily News whetted his appetite, but the emerging "new journalism" of writers like Tom Wolfe opened the floodgates.
"He quickly became the exemplar of all style writers," says Garreau. "He invented by doing."
With no rules to hold them back, Garreau, Allen and the Style staff became architects of the modern newspaper feature section. Profiles grew richer, and entertainment stories became vivid and direct. This literary approach to art criticism and features earned Allen praise, and eventually the Pulitzer Prize, which he accepted in 2000. The award hangs in the kitchen, but Allen is sincerely proud of the achievement.
"It's the greatest," he says, pulling out a framed certificate from behind some pots and pans. "And the luncheon they give up there at the Low Library at Columbia [University] is fabulous. The whole thing is very modest. There's no fireworks, no music, no robes, there's no nothing."
A lifelong doodler, Allen took up drawing as a hobby in the late 1970s. Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" became his guide.
"It teaches you a way of seeing in two dimensions," he says of the book. "It's not what they teach you in art history."
The leap from critic to artist may seem like a stretch, but Allen balances both sides.
"They have nothing to do with each other," he explains. "Writing is not criticism reversed. Painting and drawing is not art criticism reversed."
When he's not rendering those around him, Allen reaches back into history for subjects. Lincoln, Washington and Gen. William Sherman hang next to loved ones and New England cottages. Instantly recognizable, Allen uses the famous faces to prove that people look like who they are because of a few features. "Lincoln" for example, only contains the old man's nose, eyes and upper chin. Foreheads, Allen believes, "are rather dull."
"With Lincoln, I was interested in the problem of how little of [his] face can you show and still make him recognizable," he explains. "No one has walked in and asked, ‘Who is that?' The idea is to mess with people's minds. That may come out of the 60s and mind trips, as we used to say."
He admits to experimenting with psychedelic drugs, but only for a few months.
"I wasn't learning anything new, and I'm not interested in doing anything where I'm not learning something," he says.
The far-out blues, yellows, oranges and greens are the result of playing to the strengths of the color wheel. "War is Hell" depicts Sherman with a bluish green face and flecks of orange hair.
Allen's perseverance impresses Clark, who still works as an artist in The District.
"He's got a real sense of energy and color. He's really been working hard at developing his own style," Clark observes.
Influenced by artists from the post-impressionist movement, Allen sometimes infuses pastels into his faces. "War is Hell" makes Sherman resemble Van Gogh's vision of himself, vibrant and stoic.
Allen doesn't consider any of his faces portraits. He is more interested in capturing the essence of his subjects through the complexity that bonds together nostrils, ears and lips. Borrowing a tip from his years as a reporter, he researches before a pencil touches paper. Allen claims he could, at one time, name every muscle in the face. Faces change, he explains, because the tissue that moves them isn't attached to bone like other muscles in the body. His goal is to capture someone in mid-expression because that's when people expose who they are.
For his first major exhibit, which opened this week in the Mansion at Strathmore, Allen has included pictures of fruit and homes that recall Edward Hopper's Cape Cod. The intricacies of a pomegranate in watercolor may require a 60-second stare, but the show is grounded in reflections of the living and breathing.
"When you think about it, a face can change all the time because it's so fluid," he says. "You've got to be watching them all the time."
"Henry Allen: Faces" runs through June 30 at The Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is free. Call 301-581-5200 or visit www.strathmore.org.
