Title: The Body Electric: portrait of Walt Whitman
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×36
Year: 2019  SOLD

There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.     — Walt Whitman

It was the poet Walt Whitman who invented free verse, radical socialist that he was.  Before that, verse was very expensive, costing at least $12 a barrel.  He was born in Huntington on Long Island, a town named after England’s Huntington, where Oliver Cromwell was born.  In high school, I once ran the 400 (and lost) to a kid named Oliver Cromwell, who was named after Oliver Cromwell.  Walt Whitman was named after an oversized bridge in Philadelphia.   We’ve come full circle now, so let’s progress.

Wally was a Civil War nurse, he was gay, and some people rhapsodically call him our first bohemian.  He wrote “Leaves of Grass”, which informed this fiery, psychedelicized portrait of the bardo bard, but any connection between psychedelics and grass in this painting is purely coincidental, so don’t go blabbling about that non-connection, okay?  Uncharacteristically, I used no black paint in the manufacture of this painting, which I found serves to turn up the heat a little.

A final word of warning:  If you ever open a box of Whitman’s Candy, do not eat the Savoy Truffle.  As George Harrison pointed out in the song of that name, you’ll have to have them all (your teeth) pulled out after the Savoy Truffle.  But the Coconut Fudge really blows down those blues.

 

Title: Thay: portrait of Thich Nhat Hanh
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 42×31
Year: 20120

Everything we do is an act of poetry or a painting if we do it with mindfulness.  Growing lettuce is poetry.  Walking to the supermarket can be a painting.     –Thich Nhat Hanh (from Peace is Every Step)

I met the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once, when he gave a talk centered around his book “Peace is Every Step”, one of over 100 that he has published.  His command of English is limited, and this forces him to speak and write simply rather than remain silent or hire a translator, as other teachers do.  (His nickname Thay means Teacher.)

When I shook his hand, I noticed the kindness in his eyes, but also a toughness that belied his delicate grasp.  A Vietnamese Buddhist monk does not get himself nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (by MLK, 1967) for protesting a dirty Asian war without courting hardship.

I was also struck by the happiness shared by everyone in his brown-robed entourage from his Plum Village center in France, who sang for us.  They were otherwise quieter than King Solomon’s mimes, but they were all obviously very happy to be there.

In this painting, I communicate this love for their teacher by portraying Thay as wearing a knitted scarf and cap that were actually gifted to him to keep him warm and comfortable.   His wreath is formed, of course, by plum boughs.

Peace.

Title: Homestead Gray: portrait of Josh Gibson
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 46×46
Year: 2020

Title: Outrider: portrait of Anne Waldman
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×36
Year: 2019-20

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions.  I’m the girl with the unquenchable thirst.     – Anne Waldman

Poets can take you places you never even knew existed with amazing economy, and the view is great.  I find poetry to be something like a hatchet to the head, but a friendly hatchet that only dents my head rather than splits my skull and spills my brains.  But what’s another scar?  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  It’s what’s inside my head that counts.  Poets are like other artists in that they are nothing but movers of energy.  Moving energy might account for my hernia and displaced c.4 vertebrate, but my doctor disagrees.  She says they’re because I ate school paste and sniffed mimeographs as a child.

When it comes to hipdom, Anne Waldman earned her stripes.  She is associated with the core Beat poets – Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Ferlinghetti, Duncan, di Prima, Corso, and especially Allen Ginsburg, though she’s young enough to be their daughter.  Her parents were Greenwich post-war bohemians and she was active in the New York poetry scene, where she befriended Ginsberg, who introduced her to various other NY and San Francisco poets, as well as Buddhism, world travel, new thought and political activism.  A self-described poet, free woman and “outrider”, her own work shows her sensitivity to contradictions and energy imbalances in our society.  She will aggressively take on sexual harassment, abortion rights, censorship, ecology or anything else that needs taking on.

In 1974 Waldman, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima started Naropa University’s aptly named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets in Boulder, Colorado, which thrives to this day.  In this painting I celebrate Anne’s Buddhism with her beads representing peace & harmony and determination, and her hair takes on the characteristics of Tibetan wind-horse prayer flags.  Her blouse?  Pure hippie chic.

 

Title: Longevity Has Its Place: portrait of MLK
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 30×20
Year: 2013-2019  SOLD

When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent the great and perfect wisdom of God in his marvelous work of music.   – Martin Luther

It’s a good thing Martin Luther had das hodens (the balls) and the distance from Rome to push the big Reset Button the way he did.  No one should ever be afraid to do that.

The squarely square wooden panel is painted in gold to suggest a Northern European altar-piece.  The “95” refers to Luther’s 95 Theses, which he nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg.  Some of his bullet points

repeated themselves, but almost all of them were legitimate bitches.  In this painting, the hand holding the book that enumerates (but does not itemize) the Theses can’t possibly be Luther’s own hand, so it must be that of an angel or an altar boy.  I’ll go with angel.  Such messages and pointer devices occur frequently in Early Christian art, and this is Early Christian Art.

 

Title: Brando Abed
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×48
Year: 2013-2019

 

Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.  – Vito Corleone

This is my second portrait of Brando, the first being a commission for a high-ranking Army officer I knew who was always a pleasant gentleman, but was sometimes hoarse from bossing soldiers around all day.  I accepted the general’s commission, so “don’t call me ‘Sir’ – I work for a living!”,  as the cliché in Army movies goes.  He wanted me to push limits and even court controversy (moi?).  “I want to see Marlon Brando crucified like Jesus Christ!” he barked, assuming the position.  But I don’t like to make assumptions, and the Brando-martyr figure had already been done (Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now), so I opted instead for a pose from a scene in “Last Tango in Paris”, in which the subject, dressed as Stanley Kowalski, is reclining in bed and playing his harmonica, on the planet Kryton.

When I saw “Last Tango in Paris” in a student union in Cincinnati in 1975, the police, opining that the film was not wholesome enough for public consumption, cleared the theater, confiscated the film and arrested the projectionist.  They repeated the procedure in subsequent weeks starting with “A Clockwork Orange” and followed by “Midnight Cowboy” or “Straw Dogs”.   The poor projectionist was a quiet and unassuming 20-year old Jewish kid who loved movies and now had three arrests on his record.

In time, the misunderstanding was cleared up by Cincinnati’s mayor, Jerry Springer (yes, THAT Jerry Springer) and all three movies were re-screened for those of us who were waiting in suspense to find out what ever happened to the films’ main characters: Paul, Alex, David and Ratso.   I’d assumed they’d started a punk band.

 

 

 

 

Title: Tara
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×36
Year: 2020  SOLD

I’ll always have Tara.     –Scarlett O’Hara

I’ll always have Tara.

 

Title: Horseless Miscarriage: portrait of Henry Ford
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 40×48
Year: 2019

History is more or less bunk.     – Henry Ford

As is legacy.  Henry Ford also called jazz “a Jewish conspiracy to Africanize American tastes”, but that’s inaccurate – Ford’s beloved country music had that covered.

Henry Ford is famed for being the father of Edsel Ford, a hero of many crossword puzzles, along with Oona Chaplin, Yoko Ono, Bono, Elmo, Han Solo, Brian Eno, Shaq, Tina Fey, Eva Gabor, Bert Lahr, Elie Weisel, Roz Chast, Mel Ott, Bill Nye, Arthur Ashe and Hal the computer.

Henry Ford had a lot of cross words for Jews, which he used to broad effect in The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he purchased and re-tooled to trumpet his antisemitic opinions.  He believed and promoted trendy, half-baked theories about the alleged innate inferiority of any race but his own (Michiganus Americus); the kind of drivel that was recorded in The Great Gatsby when literary lug-head Tom Buchanan, played in the movie by Bruce Dern, at one point belched “Well, these books are all scientific.  It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”  (Note: ‘These books’ AND The Great Gatsby were all published by Scribner’s of New York.)

But getting back to Edsel, who I will henceforth refer to as “Ed”, his father’s target audience were racists who all of the sudden believed in science so that they could distort it to align with their prejudices.  They like things easy and within reach, like the neck and giblets at Thanksgiving dinner.  They believed that because Ford was a fine mechanic and made piles of money he must also be a brilliant anthropologist.  We forget how few tricks a clever dog really knows.  The truth is, people have far more similarities than we do differences. For every difference you note I can point out thirty-five similarities.  When we are more concerned with being great than we are with doing good, we become less exceptional.  That’s science.  Right, Ed?