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                                             

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                             

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.

 

                                       Surfer Girl:  portrait of Carissa Moore                                                             

Steven W. Justice

38×70, Oil on canvas     2022

 

The best surfer out there is the one having the most fun.     – Duke Kahanamoku

Duke also said, “Out of water, I am nothing.”  A fish out of water.  Duke and his five brothers had Waikiki Beach literally in their back yard and they became strong swimmers, and they surfed, and they turned the rest of the world on to that strange upright sport.  When Johnny Weissmuller stood to receive his first gold medal in the 1924 Olympics, for the 100 free-style, he was struck by the fact that he was standing between Duke and Samuel Kahanamoku on the medal stand (This was Duke’s 4th Olympics in 5 Olympiads – there were no 1916 Games).  The Kahanamoku’s swam for the USA, though Hawaii was not a state yet, as did Weissmuller, who no one knew was ineligible at the time, having been born in Romania.  His brother was born in Chicago, and the two swapped names and birth records so that Tarzan could swim on the American team.  Sound fair?

Fast forward to the 2020 Olympics in Japan, where surfing appeared as an Olympic sport for the first time.  The gold medal in Women’s Short-board went to an American, Carissa Moore, who is half Native Hawaiian.  She here becomes a super-hero in this delayed Pearl Harbor tag-back, with water banging around in the foreground, inspired by old Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige & Hokusai  (partly for my own self eddy-fication — sorry).  To add more Wowie to the Maui, she hangs ten on a red sun that has fallen from a sky that has been psychedelicized in the style and colors of John Van Hamersveld’s iconic Endless Summer surfing poster.

I did not know what she was standing on until I was half done with the painting.  Is she standing on a gold medal?  No, glory’s not the only point.  A globe?  Too grandiose.  A beach ball?  She’s a surfer, not a seal.  A disco ball?  I’ll not even respond to that.  A large pearl?  Botticelli already did something like that.  A 3-ball?  Only the 8-ball can float.  (Then why’s the sport called Pool?)  The only thing that made any sense to me and suited the magnitude of Clarissa Moore’s achievement was the Rising Sun.

 

                       Gold Mountain Girl: portrait of Anna May Wong                                       

Steven W. Justice

48×48,  Oil on canvas        2022

In 1869, on May 10, Central Pacific Railroad president Leland Stanford hammered home the ceremonial “Golden Spike” at Promontory Summit in Utah, to commemorate the completion of America’s transcontinental railroad.  On hand were other bosses, investors, politicians, and Irish laborers.  Omitted were all of the 20,000 Chinese laborers who constructed the more difficult western 1/3 of the project (at a 10% casualty rate), banging through high granite mountains using only picks and dynamite, while the eastern 2/3 balled along at a mile-per-day.  In this painting, I correct this oversight and include the Chinese laborers in that iconic scene.

By that day, the Chinese had already been given, as part of their severance package, a one-way rail ticket to anywhere but Promontory Summit.  In fact, the great American tradition of racial discrimination, which was easier to inflict since the social and political doldrums of the Chinese was conveniently pegged to that of African Americans, forced the Chinese to keep moving along until they eventually took refuge in the charming Chinatown ghettos tourists still enjoy in large coastal cities.

The movie actress Anna May Wong was born in L.A.’s Chinatown in 1905, 50 years after her family had emigrated from Guangzhou to strike it rich during California’s Gold Rush.  They instead wound up in their races’ stereotypical support roles of food service and laundering.  Anna May was bitten by the Hollywood movie bug at 17, and acted in 50 films followed by years of TV.  She was denied leading roles, but landed endless parts as the evil temptress, dragon lady, slave girl, exotic show girl etc.  Film censorship codes forbade so much as inter-racial smooching.  In fact, if a white leading man was even attracted to her, her character had to die.  Rules were rules.  No one died in more movies than Anna May Wong.

After a lifetime of being rejected by Americans for being too Chinese and by Chinese for being too American, she lost herself in a sea of booze and depression.  But had she not played all these stereotypical roles (and well) some White girl in yellow-face would have (and badly) while Gold Mountain Girl stayed home and folded laundry.  The cure for pain is found in the pain.

 

To Be or Not to Be:  Sarah Bernhardt as HamletSize: 54×42

Material: Oil on canvas       2021

Quand meme.  (translation: Despite Everything.) – Sarah Bernhardt’s motto

 To clear up any confusion, this is a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, a Jewish-born, Catholic-raised, French female actress playing a male, Christian Danish prince in an English play that I reset with a Buddhist title.  She cast herself as Hamlet (Hamlette?), in her own theater, in 1899, the first time a woman ever played the role, and which did not go over well with the Brits.  “Shakespeare,” she once said, “by his colossal genius,” she continued, “belongs to the ages.”  But apparently, a woman playing Hamlet was not their cup of tea.  There exist two minutes of movie footage from 1900 of her crossing swords in Hamlet’s final duel, and she appears to be a convincing sword-fighter up to a point.  She was no stranger to death scenes – they were her trademark.  Better a death by blade or poison than by a bitter critic with a penful of bile.  Either way, the show must go on.

Later in life she lost a leg, but still performed, usually in roles that required less swashbuckling.  She had a knee problem that could have been scoped in Outpatient using today’s technology, but it was 1914 and amputation was a proven cure for every ailment.  Everybody wanted the celebrity’s recently detached limb, including P.T. Barnum, who offered $10,000 for it.  He planned to stuff it and put it on display, like everything else, but perhaps his intentions were darker than that.  Sarah’s leg was later believed to have turned up in storage at a Bordeaux hospital in 2009, until some Sherlock pointed out that it was a left leg, and Sarah had lost her right.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  Either way it goes to show, if you want to make a Hamlet you’ve got to break some legs.

The background of this painting was built around the Danish flag and commercial representations of an Alphonse Mocha-style “S” and a Hebrew “B”, both outlined with Parisian subway tiles.  The border and colors borrow from iconic fin-de-siecle poster art.

 

                                                                             Amazing Grace:  portrait of Aretha Franklin                                                               

Steven W. Justice

64×30,  Oil on wood         2020

[Aretha Franklin] sings gospel from a place so deep an unbeliever will feel the presence of the divine.     – Caryn Rose

Once upon a time, there was a celebrated black Baptist minister called C.L. Franklin, whose Migration Northward after WWII started in Memphis and ended in Detroit.  To extend the reach of his infectious spoken/ shouted/ chanted/ sung messages, he made use of radio, recorded many LP record albums, and toured.  His daughter Aretha toured with him when she was 12, playing the piano and singing gospel.  At 14, she took her music outside the church and made her own records, which was fine by her open-minded father, who saw no divide between church music and secular music.  He said, “It all comes from God.”  The Franklin household was frequented by the likes of Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, the Staple Singers, B.B. King, and Martin Luther King.  (*Aretha sang at King’s funeral.)  So, she was raised in an environment where there was no shortage of inspiration, and where there was no difference between moral justice and social justice.

She proceeded to blend the spirit with the body, the sacred with the sexual, to create soul music, recording twelve albums by the age of 25.  She scored twenty #1 hit singles and earned eighteen Grammys in the process.  Aretha was a strong, black feminist who was not shy about asserting herself.  When she covered a song, she would re-sculpt it and present it her own way.  She wore what she wanted and did as she pleased.  It’s good to be queen, and better to be the Queen of Soul.

Aretha once brought Barak Obama to tears – she dropped her purse on his foot.  Not true – she brought him to tears by singing “Natural Woman”.  But she always took her purse with her, even on stage, and she always kept it where she could see it, like on top of the piano.   You touch it, you die.

So, no Aretha Franklin, no Madonna.  No Madonna, no Lady Gaga.  No you, no me.  For this, I owe you a great deal of gratitude.  Isn’t grace amazing?