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?

 

           

24×24

Oil on wood

2021

I am just a patsy!    –Lee Harvey Oswald

Some of you may think I have an obsession with Patsy’s assassin, Jack Ruby, since I have featured him in 5 paintings as of this writing.  I don’t think 5000 paintings would help me sort out that Cold War shit-show.  Nor do I want to say I, as an artist, wish to bear witness to the event, because all the witnesses in the JFK murder disappeared or were found dead.

The subject’s name was not actually Jack Maybe, it was Jack Ruby.  And his name wasn’t Jack Ruby either – it was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, from Chicago.  He worked in Army counter-intelligence in WWII and got hooked on that type of work.  He owned nightclubs, it was well known, but he also rooted out communists, before he became one himself.  Then he turned snitch and rooted out more communists, eventually being excused as a HUAC witness by Richard Nixon himself.  After that, Ruby worked with CIA operatives, running guns, ammo and counterfeit currency to Fidel Castro, then he flipped again when Castro came out as a communist in 1959.  Through all this he became acquainted with boy scouts such as Al Capone, Jimmy Hoffa, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana and Sam’s lapdog’s lapdog’s lapdog, Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old shooter of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

For reasons we may never know, Ruby considered that Oswald must be rewarded with a bullet in the belly.*  Some say it was premeditated, and even politically motivated.  Maybe yes, Maybe no.  I say it was spontaneous, because Ruby’s dog was found waiting for him in his car, and what assassin would take his dog to work with him ?

* The gun was a .38 Colt Cobra, for which Ruby paid $62.50.  It was resold in 1991 for $220,000 .

               

                                                                                                                           Don                                                                                                                

Steven W. Justice

46×70,  Oil on wood           2021

Hot cheese will kill you, man.     – Don Wozniak

“Don” is a portrait of a dear, recently departed family friend, painted at the request of his wife, also a very dear friend.  Don generously provided the boat whenever we went on one of our many Appalachian (and once Canadian) adventures, which this painting documents, complete with mountain waters filled with mysteries and dangers.  The client (his wife) asked me about the experience of doing this painting, since she could intuit that I was indeed in a heightened state of mind through its gestation and completion.  This I told her:

This painting was very fulfilling, partly because it was trippier and so unlike any other painting I’ve done, plus it was of someone near-and-dear and for people who are near-and-dear.  I worked as though Don was watching, not that I’m superstitious or believe in such science, but that was my approach, at all times, and I wanted to do him honor and make it positive, without my usual multiple messages and occasional snark.

I have lately been allowing my backgrounds to keep up with, and sometimes even upstage, my subjects.  A striking background was vital here because there was a big story to tell, and because the subject is vertical but the wall space is horizontal.  So, to support that composition, I made the format elliptical, and I made everything all sloshy, as if it were cropped from an actual scene and driven here by Don himself.  A horizontal, rectangular format would have looked like a bad crop job with a lot of unnecessary background space.  So, the background is quite detailed but is abstracted enough that it does not compete with the subject.  The water is green like Kinzua, Cheat, Norris or any other Appalachian lake.  The sky is from a photo of Lake Huron I took when we visited Honey Harbor, but it’s turned upside-down and recolored.  (* Don’t ask me why.  Maybe because Canada seemed like another country to us.)

I had been doing so much painting and so little drawing up until recently, that I found myself caught flat-footed at the start of this project.  I had seriously been wondering if I’d lost my drawing mojo, due to age, meds or what-have-you, but it all came back and I haven’t stopped since.  This was critical, because I’m a cartoonist and draw flattish, and Don cannot be drawn well flattish.  He’s too dynamic and 3-dimensional.

Being committed to an oval format necessitated a stable, rigid panel, so I used  ¾” birch plywood.  Birch ply costs no more than a stretched canvas, so I welcomed the exercise.

                       

 

 

                                            Title:  Colla Sinistra:  portrait of Clara Schumann

Size: 60×44

Material: Oil on canvas

Date: 2016

Art is a fine gift!  What, indeed, is finer than to clothe one’s feelings in music, what a comfort in time of trouble, what a pleasure, what an exquisite feeling to give happy hours to so many people!     

— Clara Schumann

Robert Schumann is such a minor character in this double portrait that he’s not even present, leaving us with no choice but to consider this painting’s supporting subject, Bob’s wife Clara, who covered for his physical and psychological absences by reaching continental celebrity status through non-stop gigging, teaching piano, and composing and publishing music.  The Schumann’s had 8 children to raise and put through boarding school, and Clara enabled this too.  “She could bring home the bacon, and fry it up in a pan…”, to quote a line from no song of hers.

In this composition I allow the oval, 19^th– century studio photo matt to sag into an egg-shape, a symbol of fertility.  One of the roses (pressed within the frame?) is missing.  Like Robert.

The title “Colla Sinistra” is a musical term that refers to piano music composed for the left hand, and notated as “Cs”, which also happens to be Clara’s initials.  See how that works?