Can 5,500 Dog Portraits Raise Awareness?

By Radha Marcum
Senior Editor

In a large artist’s workshop in Louisville, Kentucky, painter Mark Barone creates expressive portraits of shelter dogs seven days a week. He has painted for over 1,400 straight days, finishing as many as twenty portraits in a single day for the project An Act of Dog. The goal? To raise public awareness about shelter animals that have been put down, by capturing them in paint, and build a “forever fund” to save the rest.

The idea for the project arose when the canine companion of Barone and his partner, Marina Dervan, passed away after twenty-one years. “I had always been a cat lady,” admits Dervan, “but Santina got inside of me in a deep way.” She began looking online to adopt another dog.

“Instead of finding a dog, I came across the chilling statistic that approximately 5,500 dogs are killed in shelters each day,” says Dervan. She forwarded the information to Barone, whose initial reaction was, “Stop sending these e-mails.” But those facts brought on an “intense dialogue,” after which Barone had the vision for An Act of Dog project. “Rescues and shelters can’t get PR,” Dervan points out. “We knew we would have to create something large to garner media attention.”

Barone, who had not previously painted animal portraits, set to work to determine how he could complete such a large body of work. “I had to explore whether I could create so many images that would meet my standards,” he explains. His process evolved during the first eight hundred to a thousand paintings until he found a rhythm: “I draw out twenty at a time. After that I coat the whole thing in sepia. Next I wipe out the light parts and use a brush to augment the dark. Then I start working in the color.”

He paints from photographs sent by volunteers at the shelters or rescue organizations that weren’t able to save the dogs. “I look at lost spirits and try to capture who they are. Their spirits are as varied as human spirits. A lot comes out in the paint—the strokes, how you apply the paint.”

Barone cashed in all of his retirement savings to support the project; and to help finish the production, An Act of Dog has recently started creating incentive merchandise as gifts for people who make donations. Over the long run, they intend to use the 5,500 images on various merchandise to build a forever fund for the animals and life-saving groups, says Barone. “Even though I have no cushion left for us as we get older, I can sleep at night knowing that I didn’t turn away and do nothing but made better use of the money for humanity—that I helped cultivate more compassion and care for our animals.”

Barone and Dervan adopted a dog, Gigi, when they moved to Louisville. The couple have also adopted two stray cats, Santo and Twitch. They plan to adopt another dog as a companion for Gigi when the Museum of Compassion finds a permanent home.

Barone is scheduled to complete all 5,500 portraits by early 2015. In the meantime, An Act of Dog is in search of a permanent location for the paintings. “We’ve had offers from different cities. We’re looking for the right partnership,” says Dervan. Their vision for the Museum of Compassion is to raise funds to save the animals, educate the public, and support rescues, shelters, animal adoption and compassion training.

“We want to take people through a visceral experience and go right into the solution,” Dervan concludes. “We want to fuse the power of art with the science of compassion and the heart of philanthropy, and assist people in understanding how powerful animals are for helping us develop empathy at any age.” So far, An Act of Dog has reached hundreds of thousands of people via their website, social sharing and media attention. A PBS documentary about An Act of Dog is due out in 2015.

Watch a two-minute trailer of the PBS documentary here.

To see more portraits, stay in touch with the project, or make a contribution to An Act of Dog, visit www.anactofdog.org.