Steve Justice Studio

Art - Design

Keef

Peacenik: portrait of Allen Ginsberg

Peacenik: portrait of Allen Ginsberg 124. Steven W. Justice 41 dia., Oil on wood 2022 Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness. – Allen Ginsberg Allen Ginsberg made supporting appearances in at least nine of his fellow Beat soul-brother Jack Kerouac’s novels, all under assumed names. In “The Town and the City”, he is Leon Levinsky. In “On the Road”, he is Carlo Marx. In “The Dharma Bums”, he is Alvah Goldbrook. In “The Subterraneans”, he is Adam Moorad. And in “The Vanity of Duluoz”, “Visions of Cody”, “Big Sur”, “Book of Dreams” and “Desolation Angels”, he is Irwin Garden. In “Desolation Angels”, Ginsberg’s father appears as Harry Garden. I still wonder how Alvah Goldbrook in “The Dharma Bums” becomes Irwin Garden in “Desolation Angels”, since the latter novel grew from and is an extension of the former, but the answer to that question may be for higher minds than mine. It’s Jack’s call anyhow, being the author. I wonder also if the surname “Garden” had something to do with Ginsberg’s being a Joisey boy. Oh -- there is one more alias that I almost forgot -- Ginsberg appears as David Stofsky in Beat-wannabe John Clellon Holmes’ novel “Go!”, which JCH originally called “The Daybreak Boys”, which would have been apt since almost all the characters and writers in Beat literature were male. Women served as their lust-objects and muses with about three emotions and no ambitions. But those gone cats could write! Allen Ginsberg would have perhaps been one of our greatest poets were he only able to curb his potty-mouth. (And get a haircut like Robert Frost’s.) He even wound up in court over his word-choices in his game-changing poem “Howl”, whose book also contained the majestic “Sunflower Sutra”. The judge sided with Allen and his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, feeling creative geniuses are gifts, and that we should never look a gift horse in the potty-mouth.

 

Peacenik: portrait of Allen Ginsberg 124. Steven W. Justice 41 dia., Oil on wood 2022 Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness. – Allen Ginsberg Allen Ginsberg made supporting appearances in at least nine of his fellow Beat soul-brother Jack Kerouac’s novels, all under assumed names. In “The Town and the City”, he is Leon Levinsky. In “On the Road”, he is Carlo Marx. In “The Dharma Bums”, he is Alvah Goldbrook. In “The Subterraneans”, he is Adam Moorad. And in “The Vanity of Duluoz”, “Visions of Cody”, “Big Sur”, “Book of Dreams” and “Desolation Angels”, he is Irwin Garden. In “Desolation Angels”, Ginsberg’s father appears as Harry Garden. I still wonder how Alvah Goldbrook in “The Dharma Bums” becomes Irwin Garden in “Desolation Angels”, since the latter novel grew from and is an extension of the former, but the answer to that question may be for higher minds than mine. It’s Jack’s call anyhow, being the author. I wonder also if the surname “Garden” had something to do with Ginsberg’s being a Joisey boy. Oh -- there is one more alias that I almost forgot -- Ginsberg appears as David Stofsky in Beat-wannabe John Clellon Holmes’ novel “Go!”, which JCH originally called “The Daybreak Boys”, which would have been apt since almost all the characters and writers in Beat literature were male. Women served as their lust-objects and muses with about three emotions and no ambitions. But those gone cats could write! Allen Ginsberg would have perhaps been one of our greatest poets were he only able to curb his potty-mouth. (And get a haircut like Robert Frost’s.) He even wound up in court over his word-choices in his game-changing poem “Howl”, whose book also contained the majestic “Sunflower Sutra”. The judge sided with Allen and his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, feeling creative geniuses are gifts, and that we should never look a gift horse in the potty-mouth.

Peacenik: portrait of Allen Ginsberg

Steven W. Justice

41 dia., Oil on wood

2022

Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.     – Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg made supporting appearances in at least nine of his fellow Beat soul-brother Jack Kerouac’s novels, all under assumed names.  In “The Town and the City”, he is Leon Levinsky.  In “On the Road”, he is Carlo Marx.  In “The Dharma Bums”, he is Alvah Goldbrook.  In “The Subterraneans”, he is Adam Moorad.  And in “The Vanity of Duluoz”, “Visions of Cody”, “Big Sur”, “Book of Dreams” and “Desolation Angels”, he is Irwin Garden.  In “Desolation Angels”, Ginsberg’s father appears as Harry Garden.  I still wonder how Alvah Goldbrook in “The Dharma Bums” becomes Irwin Garden in “Desolation Angels”, since the latter novel grew from and is an extension of the former, but the answer to that question may be for higher minds than mine.  It’s Jack’s call anyhow, being the author.  I wonder also if the surname “Garden” had something to do with Ginsberg’s being a Joisey boy.  Oh — there is one more alias that I almost forgot — Ginsberg appears as David Stofsky in Beat-wannabe John Clellon Holmes’ novel “Go!”, which JCH originally called “The Daybreak Boys”, which would have been apt since almost all the characters and writers in Beat literature were male.  Women served as their lust-objects and muses with about three emotions and no ambitions.  But those gone cats could write!  Allen Ginsberg would have perhaps been one of our greatest poets were he only able to curb his potty-mouth.  (And get a haircut like Robert Frost’s.)  He even wound up in court over his word-choices in his game-changing poem “Howl”, whose book also contained the majestic “Sunflower Sutra”.  The judge sided with Allen and his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, feeling creative geniuses are gifts, and that we should never look a gift horse in the potty-mouth.

William Blake wrote the poem “Ah! Sunflower”, which served as Ginsberg’s wake-up call and guiding light when he heard Blake’s disembodied voice recite it one night in 1948, and all hell broke loose in Ginsberg’s head.  Aren’t artists great?  As Blake himself wrote in his poem To God, “If you have formed a Circle to go into/ Go into it yourself and see how you would do.”  That’s it.  That’s the whole poem.

 

 

 

I Told You So: portrait of Greta Thunberg

                                                                             I Told You So:  portrait of Greta Thunberg                                             

Steven W. Justice

54×42,  Oil on canvas                   2021

Those who wish to sing always find a song. – Swedish proverb

All of her lectures start the same, something like:  “My name is Greta Thunberg, I am 16 years old (or 17-19), and I’m a climate activist from Sweden”.  She’ll go on to bluntly tell you, “Our house is on fire,” or “I want you to panic,” or “This is all wrong – I should not be standing here,” or “You don’t want to listen to us because we are just children.”

Do you not want to listen to her?  Does her message about fixing our global warming problem make you uncomfortable?  Then I will advise you to hedge your bet and play along anyhow.  She’s our “canary in a coal mine”.  When your canary drops dead, it’s time to flee the coal mine, not try to alter reality by closing your eyes and holding your ears.  But if your mule drops dead in a coal mine, you’re living in the wrong century.  You refuse to listen to a woman?  Then you’re living half a life.  You won’t listen to someone who wears braids?  Then don’t tell me how much you like Willie Nelson.  You won’t listen to someone with a mental disorder?  I’ll ask you, what is mental order supposed to look like?  Greta courageously admits she is autistic.  Specifically, she has Asberger’s Syndrome.  She is “on the Spectrum”, as we say.  (This painting’s colors came to me in a dream.)  But we all are – the Spectrum is a 360 degree seamless wheel of color.  (If you aren’t, I’d like to know where you’re hiding.)  But, her mind sees in black and white.  So, she can identify a life-or-death situation when she sees one and quickly frame our options.   When the stigma of being non-ordinary is overcome (they are fabrications anyhow), and when a mental illness is effectively managed, it can make a messenger from another time and place out of someone we would, in more ignorant times, shunt aside.  That is some very creative soil, and another resource worth saving.  You sometimes need to listen to what you don’t want to hear.  Listen and learn.  Now.  It’s not too late.  Yet.

Greta (Swedish) and I (Finnish) also share the rising Baltic Sea, in which she here stands with braids like the anchor chains of an ice-breaker.

 

 

Do You Know This Man? portrait of William Bonney

 

                          Do You Know This Man?:  portrait of William Bonney                             

Steven W. Justice

68×30, Oil on Wood                      2022

I’ve said elsewhen, that the past is history and the future is mystery, and we’ve got to correctly interpret the former in order to effectively prepare for the latter.  History never moves in a straight line, you see because Einstein said there is no such thing as a straight line.

Let’s set the record straight about Billy the Kid, AKA William Bonney, Henry McCarty, Kid Antrim, and William Antrim.  Contrary to most assumptions, the NYC native/New Mexico resident was intelligent, educated and well-read, he wrote long letters to his mother, he liked to sing and dance, and he was a big-time lady charmer.  He was also an excellent horse thief.  His M.O. was to select a horse, buy it a drink, then gallop off to the next town, where he’d trade or sell the horse and steal another, ride to the next town, and repeat the procedure.  The horse’s owner would stop pursuing once they recovered their horse, and the law always seemed to have bigger fish to fry.  BUT, the Kid’s fatal flaw was that he’d sometimes get busted and jailed, then he’d escape.  It was kinda cute at first — he was such a runt that he could escape by crawling through a drain trap – but he was Billy the Kid, not Winnie the Pooh, and, psychopath that he was, his escapes became more violent as security was tightened.  So, Winnie kept digging himself deeper and deeper.  By the time he died, at age 21, he’d scored 9 murders and 4 assists.  Billy, I mean – not Winnie.  With his knowledge and respect for Mexican culture and their language, Billy could have disappeared into Mexico, but he never left the county and was found and shot at his girlfriend’s father’s friend’s girlfriend’s ranch, in the dark, as he was making a sandwich.  His final words were “Quien es?”  meaning “Who’s there?”  He was responding to Pat Garrett’s funny knock-knock joke:  “Knock-knock.”  “Quien es?”  “Knock-knock knocking on Heaven’s door!”  BANG !

This painting shows the casual, Praxitelean pose assumed by the Kid in his only known photograph, reminding us that he really was just a kid.  (*There may be a second photo of him, in a group of men that includes Pat Garrett.)  The bright colors are drawn from the retail chains Kids-R-Us or GAP Kids (get it?), and also from a bizarre cowboy in a dream I once had.

 

Don’t Tread on Fred: portrait of Frederick Douglass

                                                              Don’t Tread on Fred: portrait of Frederick Douglass                           

Steven W. Justice

36×60,  Oil on canvas          2021

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818, into the indignity and violence of slavery, and went on to become the most photographed subject of the 19th century.  And in those days, photography was not cheap: a dauguerreotype in the 1840’s might cost between 80 and 200 dollars in today’s dollars.  That alone suggests something about his hard-earned celebrity as being one of America’s greatest pugilists in the battle for freedom and equality, though celebrity is too small a word for such a big person.

He never knew his father and barely knew his mother, and educated himself from a young age.  He beat up drivers, breakers and overseers, he ran away, he networked and raised money in Europe, he bought his own freedom, and he became a brilliant writer, orator, teacher, publisher, freedom fighter, abolitionist, suffragist, veterans’ advocate and so much more.  He served in high-ranking federal appointments under five presidents.  He was prejudicially thought to be a fraud at first, since no-one expected an ex-slave to be so eloquent, but his five memoirs and his numerous deeds silenced his doubters.  You can’t fake that kind of genius.

You may wonder, whence the five Frederick’s?  I’ll tell you if you promise to never again use the word “whence”.  It is because I’d previously portrayed Douglass’s Rochester, NY, co-activist Susan B. Anthony, as “The Seven Susans”, to make the same point, that we are not talking about individuals who can be erased from history books and ignored out of fear.  We are talking about legions of every color and variety who always have been and always will be here to fight when necessary.  Does the critic believe they can turn back the clock 150-200 years to make their own misperceived inconveniences go away?  The imbalance is unsustainable and we’d be back where we are in another 150-200 years, so here we are and here we’ll stay.

The title “Don’t Tread on Fred” was borrowed from the 1775 “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsen flag, created by Christopher Gadsen and adopted by the Marines, at a time when timber rattlers like that depicted on the Gadsen flag were used to symbolize America, way before the eagle was.