Steve Justice Studio

Art - Design

A portrait of the Artist as a Young Children

Steve Justice Painting Title: A portrait of the Artist as a Young Children SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 30x120 Year: 1989 I Warholesqely repeat a drawing from an early photo of me having a bad day at the Allegheny County Fair, to make a comment on abundance and entitlement in America’s postwar years.

Steve Justice Painting Title: A portrait of the Artist as a Young Children SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 30x120 Year: 1989 I Warholesqely repeat a drawing from an early photo of me having a bad day at the Allegheny County Fair, to make a comment on abundance and entitlement in America’s postwar years. A portrait of the Artist as a Young Children 
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 30×120
Year: 1989 SOLD

 

I am a deeply superficial person.     – Andy Warhol

As a lad in Pittsburgh, I studied art at the Carnegie Institute under Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, a hardy Irishman who called girls lasses, boys lads, and Guinness angel piss.  (Okay, I made the Guinness part up, but the first three claims are true.)  He was Andy Warhol’s former instructor, for 15 minutes. Or 15 years — whichever is longer.   In spite of all the excitement, distractions, and circus atmosphere that defined the college scene of Pittsburgh’s Oakland district in the late 1960s, Mr. Fitzpatrick provided fundamental training in drawing and painting that was as solid as the cinder block wall of the Ryan Home in which I lived, and he taught me that an artist doesn’t need shock to create awe.

Everybody in Pittsburgh knew who Andy Warhol was.  He was Pittsbugh’s Daniel Boone of the arts, blazing the trail from Pittsburgh to New York City. We’d read the papers and seen his work around town and at the Carnegie Intl.  art exhibition, but Fitzpatrick’s message was:  Yes, we may paint like a pop artist, but no, we may not paint like a pop artist.  Not yet.  He wanted us to learn how to run before we could walk, and walk before we could crawl.  Make it until you fake it.  Talk it like you walk it.  Lay it as you play it.  Grow it as you crow it.  And don’t take no wooden pickles in the process.  They’re too hard to process.

While I have your attention, let me tell you about the subjects of this painting, little Stevie.  The kid with a thousand cow-licks speaking perfectly loud.  And a temper — he once pistol-whipped a playmate with a toy cowboy cap-gun.  (The kid still wouldn’t shut up!)  But let me digress.  When Stevie was about the same age as this painting’s subjects, he jumped off a shed roof, which was probably a 15-20 foot drop at the downhill side, while having to clear a large pile of yellow bricks recycled from the old Ohio River Boulevard, and he landed like he was a soldier in the 101st  Stillborne Division.  He’d been assured by his neighbor Eddie Haskel that he could fly like Peter Pan if he put his mind to it.  He instead sprained both ankles, almost bit off his tongue, and he’s also learned, after 58 years, that he’d fractured a vertebra and it’s still broken.  But, no matter — he has 32 more.

 

 

 

Aiti Pullankanssa

Steve Justice Painting Title: Aiti Pullankanssa Material: oil on canvas Size: 72x60 Year: 1989 This is a portrait of my Finnish grandmother. Pulla is Finnish coffee bread.

Steve Justice Painting Title: Aiti Pullankanssa Material: oil on canvas Size: 72x60 Year: 1989 This is a portrait of my Finnish grandmother. Pulla is Finnish coffee bread.Title: Aiti Pullankanssa
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 72×60
Year: 1989

 

The major concern was to create a monument which would have lasting significance and would be a landmark of our time.  Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose.  But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.     — Eero Saarinen

Me and my Eero.

Aiti was my Finnish grandmother.  ‘Aiti’ means ‘Mother’, ‘pulla’ is Finnish coffee bread, ‘kansa’ means ‘with her’, and ‘molopaa’ means ‘dick-head’.  So “Aiti Pullankansaa” means “Mother with Her Coffee Bread”*.   But I speak none of that tangled coat-hanger of a language, and Finns rarely speak at all, so reality in Aiti’s dark, wooden house tended to slowly spiral into a point of nothing like a snake consuming itself tail-first.  But there are no snakes in Finland, unless it can be proven otherwise by some smart zoologist.  None that I know of, anyhow.  I’m certain there are no grasshoppers, thanks to St. Urho, who drove them out.  This is well-documented.  Now if someone could drive the dogs out of West Philly.

Unless we wanted to watch baseball with my grandfather Ukki (“Grandfather”) we could read a book on the porch or, if we were really bored, wander up to the Fineview schoolyard and sportingly present ourselves to be beaten senseless by the Irish city kids for mocking their inarticulate attempts to engage us verbally.  While enjoying the fine view of the gray Pittsburgh sky with our backs on the broken asphalt, of course.

*Finnish words can be ridiculously long, because they string all of a noun’s modifiers together into one extended, seamless word.  For instance, the English phrase “even with its quality of not being possible to be made irrational” becomes the Finnish word “epajarjestelmallistyttamattmyydel-lansakaan”.  It seems unfair that Latin is a dead language, but Finnish lives.

 

 

Surreal Thing

Steve Justice Painting Surreal Thing, #2

Steve Justice Painting Surreal Thing, #2
Title: Surreal Thing
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 36×48
Year: 1988

Lisa Mona

Steve Justice Painting Title: Lisa Mona SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 35x24 Year: 1988 “O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than the renown of riches.” -- Leonardo da Vinci The actual Mona Lisa is this same size. The frame was made using actual pasta.

Steve Justice Painting Title: Lisa Mona SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 35x24 Year: 1988 “O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than the renown of riches.” -- Leonardo da Vinci The actual Mona Lisa is this same size. The frame was made using actual pasta.Title: Lisa Mona SOLD
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 35×24
Year: 1988

“O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than the renown of riches.” — Leonardo da Vinci

The actual Mona Lisa is this same size. The frame was made using actual pasta.

We Were on the Threshold of a New Frontier

Steve Justice Painting Title: We Were on the Threshold of a New Frontier SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 54x72 Year: 1988 “I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.” --John Glenn The early astronauts were be-heroed by every school kid when I was young, but I’d be hard pressed to name any after about 1972.

Steve Justice Painting Title: We Were on the Threshold of a New Frontier SOLD Material: oil on canvas Size: 54x72 Year: 1988 “I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.” --John Glenn The early astronauts were be-heroed by every school kid when I was young, but I’d be hard pressed to name any after about 1972.Title: We Were on the Threshold of a New Frontier SOLD
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 54×72
Year: 1988

I don’t know what you could say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets.     – John Glenn

We knew who the early astronauts were because we were taught that they would be our new heroes until someone more exciting came along, like the Beatles, Stones and Animals did only a couple years later.   We watched John Glenn ride the rocket on a grainy black-and-white television that was so huge that the custodian could wheel it into the classroom only after knocking out a wall, and so complex in its operation that only the principal could work the controls.  The tallest boy in the class had to hold the antennas just so, for the best reception, so he missed everything.  As usual, the kids who had a hard time paying attention to more than half an orbit were locked in the darkened coat room for 10 to 20 minutes (or longer if the teacher forgot about them), the usual punishment for such a crime and a proven cure for ADD, left-handedness,  gender issues and polio. But the rest of us sat on the floor and watched our brave space monkey ride around the world three times.

My lines, shapes and colors find their way as if guided by some kind of memory, and the opposite of memory isn’t forgetting – it’s not yet knowing, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that.  The artist can be a witness to history.  A custodian of memory – when memory pukes we’re there to mop it up.

We cannot remember what we never knew, nor can we recognize what we don’t understand.  Understand ?

 

I Was Here I Am: portrait of Quanah Parker

Steve Justice Title: Comanche: portrait of Quanah Parker Material: oil on canvas Size: 66x66 Year: 1988 This painting was prompted by a dream in which a Native American questioned me as to why I was on his land.

Steve Justice Title: Comanche: portrait of Quanah Parker Material: oil on canvas Size: 66x66 Year: 1988 This painting was prompted by a dream in which a Native American questioned me as to why I was on his land.Title: I Was Here I Am: portrait of Quanah Parker
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 66×66
Year: 1988

This painting was prompted by a dream in which a Native American questioned me as to why I was on his land.