Rudi Stern : In Memory

I did this portrait of Rudi Stern in July, 2002, in a small outdoor café in Jersey City, NJ, directly across the Hudson River from where the World Trade Center towers had come thundering down less than one year previously. Rudi was telling us how he had been walking his dog, as usual, that September morning along the river when the proverbial feces hit the fan. Even from across the river he could see people jumping from the top of the stricken towers as the smoke billowed up. Oddly enough, in August 2001 he had sent us a postcard to invite us to a party he was throwing on September 9th, 2001 at his new studio in Jersey City, as a housewarming. This is the postcard, on which he had pasted the PS about the view from his roof... a view that was radically transformed just two days later :
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All things considered, I suppose it is just as well that we couldn't make it to Rudi's party that weekend, as we probably would have had a hard time getting back to France if we had stayed for a day or two afterwards, which would have been likely.