They come to you because they like your work, then you should have the full control to do the picture. It's sometimes necessary to show them you're the boss. He refuses to generalize and believes that it may have more to do with the artist than with the subject. As with a great many portrait artists, the first thing Mr. Pionk strives for in a portrait is a likeness, and the best way to get a likeness, he asserts, is to measure. Anyone who is a good portrait painter will get likeness and character, but achieving a likeness, he maintains, depends basically on measuring.
Some people think it can be done by painting one or two faces.
You get it by doing a lot of work and years of practice. At times, Mr. Pionk does rely on photographs, because some people sometimes can't sit for great lengths of time. He takes many shots using a Polaroid camera so that he can see the results immediately and then have the snapshots enlarged in a laser-type blowup. In addition, he does several very fast paint sketches and paints the portrait from those. Like Everett Raymond Kinstler, he believes that it is impossible to do too much work.