‘I paint the kind of people I’m attracted to’: Hernan Bas on hiding from the world in Venice

The Cuban-American artist likes to paint pretty young white men – inspired by his fascination with Holden Caulfield. So why do his portraits have a sinister edge? Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He’s aware of the ironies. (He is the kind of tourist, he tells me, who started looking at Venetian property prices, oh, about a week into his stay.) The Cuban-American artist is from Miami, and he knows about mass tourism all too intimately: he lives in an neighbourhoo