Artist, Alice Neel: I’m a collector of souls. But I really love people under all kinds of stresses also, you know. I’m frankly a psychological painter because life does a lot of things to people.
Georgie, Georgie Arce. In ’55 I did this. I had a boxer dog in those days. I met him out in the street, and he said, “Can I come and play with your boxer?” So I did a whole series of Georgies. Very smart. But he was so proud he wouldn’t even let them know that he couldn’t read and write. And they had so many pupils in the class, they couldn’t concentrate on one little boy, you know.
He had more than usual intelligence, but he also saw that the thing in this country was to have money. He got to [be] mixed up, I suppose, with some gangsters. He’s in jail now. But he still writes to me.
And also when I finish a painting, I sometimes feel another way. You see, I get terribly involved so that I leave myself and I go into that person. So sometimes after the person goes, I feel just as though I have an empty inside that I have nothing inside.
Archival audio excerpted from Alice Neel: They Are Their Own Gifts. 1978. United States. Directed by Lucille Rhodes and Margaret Murphy. Courtesy the filmmakers and The Metropolitan Museum of Art