Title: Sherpa, Portrait of Tenzing Norgay
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×36
Year: 2019

I have never regarded myself as a hero, but Tenzing undoubtedly was. — Sir Edmund Hillary

Once upon a time, climbing mountains in the Himalayas was a challenge, so climbers would hire local Sherpas to help.  These Sherpas were experienced climbers themselves, with low pulse rates and noives of steel.  Every Nepalese boy wanted to be a Sherpa for the prestige, the money and the surplus equipment.  A Sherpa jocking around with his ropes, goggles and thick climbing boots was the envy of everyone.  It was a ticket out of the dull, unpromising life they faced as small-time herders.

There is no evidence, photographic or otherwise, that Sir Edmund Hillary, reputedly the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest (in 1953), ever did so.  But there are pictures he took of his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, standing on the summit, waving and planting a flag.  Just sayin’.

Neither man knew they’d be the ones selected to make the final assault, since an expedition would send up the climber and Sherpa most likely to finish the job.  The best horses on the track.  So, it could have been anyone other than Hillary and Tenzing, who were in the right place in the right shape at the right time.  Tenzing would have been okay with it either way, I aver, because he had already been to the summit of Mount Everest many times.  That’s my theory, which is as thin as air at 26 thousand feet.

I celebrate Tenzing Norgay in this painting, the Tiger of the Himalayas, sitting higher than McGuinn and McGuire, atop the highest mountain on earth.

 

 

Title: Tutti-Fruitti Prosecutti: Sacco and Vanzetti
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 42×42
Year: 2018

There is the best man I ever cast my eyes upon since I lived, a man that will last and will grow always more near to and more dear to the heart of the people, so long as admiration for goodness, for virtues, and for sacrifice will last.  I mean Eugene V. Debs.   – Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Unpopular ethnic group + Unpopular politics = The usual suspects.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are as inseparable in our minds as Bonnie & Clyde, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, Caspar and Pollux, The Smothers Brothers, Republicans and sexism, or Chang and Eng (who were Barnum’s co-joined twins — sick, I know).  In this painting I correct the order in which our heroes are usually photographically shown, by placing Sacco on the left and Vanzetti on the right.   The gagootz and the hot-head.  They showed up every day in the courtroom for years (their trial dragged on for seven), dressing like governors and courteously removing their hats for judges, ladies, photographers and executioners.

Neapolitan ice cream in the background plays the part of the Italian flag, but with a twist, though neither man was Neapolitan or could afford ice cream.

I feel I captured Sacco & Vanzetti as well as an artist can, but the Bridgewater, Massachusetts Police captured them first.  Coincidentally, both men died on the same day, on August 23, 1927.  They were both innocent, but Vanzetti deserved the noose for his outrageous moustache alone.  Don’t be too impressed, his sister’s was even bigger.

Title: Beggars Can’t Be Chaucers
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 72×48
Year: 2016-2019

“By God,” quod he, “for pleynly, at a word, Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!”     — Geoffrey Chaucer

Goeffrey Chaucer writen Canterbury Tales and some other things, including a body of poetry big enough to fil a Penguin anthology.  Yes, that big, and he writen all those shorter poems during a single two-week bender.

With style and mood nicked from illuminated manuscripts and cathedrals themselves, a pilgrimage unto Canterbury is here shown with Goeffrey himself in his own tale, confronting pitous beggars.  But Chaucer was nat so class-conscious.  Although he was a good accountant, his career checking wool exports for tax purposes was nat as lucrative as his boss Richard the Gaunt hoped it would be for the two of them, due to Chaucer’s integrity.  This also caused a lyfelong rift between him and his wyf, who really got off on being a Lady in the Queen’s court and lived highly in digs north of London, while her housbonde shivered in government housing inside a city gate with stoon wals 13 feet thick and arrow slits for windwes.  But it was the perfect place for a government accountant to brood between manic outbursts of writing.

In the top half of this peynting, soaring vaults describe the vertical, bigger-than-man sense one experiences in an ancient cathedral.  All that, just to keep reyn off the backs of people who are preyest.  As for the color, I tried to peynt the cathedral’s echo, and Canterbury Cathedral does look like it’s built out of tons and tons of sepia.  I tried yellow ochre at first, but I’m not fond of yellow ochre.  In fact, even yellow ochre’s mom hates yellow ochre.

The rendering of figures in old manuscripts always looks so amateurish and cartoony to our eyes, that even the horses resemble toys, so I took the next logical step and turned Geoff’s hors into the toy My Pretty Pony, which adds levity to all this medieval ponderance.  Levity and branding.  I rely on the hors to put the canter into Canterbury.

Title: Lester in Love: Portrait of Lester Young and Billie Holiday
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2018

I’d been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I’d been doing wrong.  I’d been singing too loud.  One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me.  Relax, just relax.  It’s going to be all right.     – Marvin Gaye

In this painting, I explore a successful “musical romance”, which are rarely romances in a traditional sense, but rather ones in which the energy between the two parties squares itself so their combined result is far in excess of the sum of their individual talents.  That club is legendary:  Marvin Gaye & Tammy Terrill, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gourmet, Mimi & Richard Farina, Sonny & Cher, Lennon & McCartney (bromance), Prince & himself, and numerous others.

In the case of Pres and Lady Day, the romance was purely creative and ended whenever the music did, as both parties suffered through numerous disfunctions and were both bugled to Jesus way before their time.  God Bless the Childs.  Some of their art found its way into mine with Pennies from Heaven pouring in from four vanishing points creating Polka Dots and Moonbeams.  (These are songs of theirs.)  My Funny Valentine is a broken heart, tilted to one side.  Lester Leaps In and lines and colors plow through the painting somehow as in an improvised leap of faith.  I toy with scale, perspective and feigned double-exposure, as I do in other paintings, to add some jangle and deliberate contradiction.  Or not.

 

 

 

 

Title: Look to See to Remember: Portrait of Joseph C. Fitzpatrick
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 30×24
Year: 2019

Look to see to remember.     – Joseph C. Fitzpatrick

With this portrait I am honoring Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, my former art instructor at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, where I studied in my formative years.  He also taught Andy Warhol.  Fitzpatrick’s training was classical, though he was open-minded enough to identify a good thing when he saw one.  Andy famously went on to have fifteen minutes of fame.

I allow some Andy to leak into this portrait through the Warholic slipping of the color registration, which characterizes many of his own prints.  I reference Fitzpatrick’s classical background with a classical background, here nicked from the Mona Lisa, but which also calls to mind the Irish or Western Pennsylvaniaish countryside, or even the scenic paintings in Carnegie Museum’s famous animal dioramas, which we sketched endlessly with soft 4B pencils while sitting on the hard marble floor.

The Renaissance stars (some of them steel) also refer to the Pittsburgh own Renaissance, which Joe, Andy, and I participated in.

Fitzpatrick said every artist should have someone standing behind him with a hammer to clobber him when they think the artist is finished.  Many people believe the Mona Lisa was never finished, like so many other projects Leonardo da Vinci took on.  Freud would have had a field day with him.  (What’s that you say?  He did?)  But think of all the hammer blows Leonard avoided receiving.

Leonardo wrote all his notes backwards, which is why, to this day, scholars have never been able to decipher what he was thinking about.  It was da Vinci’s code.

 

Title: Frida People: portrait of Frida Kahlo
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 58×42
Year: 2018  SOLD

Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence.  The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence. — Frida Kahlo

Do surrealists make strange people or do strange people make surrealists?  Am I maybe putting the art before the source?  Frida considered herself a realist.  Really.

Frida Kahlo combined Mexican culture, Catholic faith, European surrealism (she was half German), social realist style and memoir to produce magical paintings.  She endured 27 major surgeries as a result of a traffic accident and produced at least that many paintings telling about it, many of them with her own guts flying around on red tethers as if spring-loaded.  This morbid sub-genre of hers brought to my mind the classic game introduced in the 1960s, Operation, which was invented by a Cub Scout and is used to train surgeons in Ivy League med schools.

In this painting the “Operacion” body parts become Milagro charms which replace rosas on a vine surrounding Our Lady of Perpetual Co-payments, who is positioned in a frontal pose and in a format that is proportioned and bordered like a saint card.

Title: Dorothy Parker
Material: Oil on wood
Size: 40×30
Year: 2014   SOLD

Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.     – Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker could hold her own and more at the Algonquin Roundtable, where she drank gin with the likes of (and dislikes of) Alexander Woollcott, the Marx Brothers, George S. Kauffman and Shirley Temple, who usually ordered a Shirley Temple.  This painting has the viewer wondering if Dorothy approves or disapproves of you.  Does it matter?  Say no.

I use basic shapes, mechanical movement and naturally derived decoration to suggest Art Deco of the 1920’s with the unfortunate simplicity of an early New Yorker magazine cover.

This painting is the first in which I change my story halfway through the scene and become inconsistent with the colors in my deliberate negligence.  If a senator can ignore science, why can’t I?  To me the truth is a path and not a destination, so I see nothing wrong with interrupting the predictability of a painting when it contributes to a greater good.

Title: The Beechers on the Beach
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 54×46
Year: 2018

Is this the little woman that made this great war?     — Abraham Lincoln

In this multiple portrait, I explore the New Jim Crow and other 21^st century disfunctions and broken promises, with references to 19^th century studio portrait photography and allegorical art.  A poor character from an abolitionist poster (printer Josiah Wedgwood’s invention, not mine), appeals for freedom to the two celebrity abolitionists and public intellectuals, as Harriet Beecher Stowe sits in Lincoln’s Memorial chair and Henry Ward Beecher dreamily ponders his next lecture (or dalliance).

A chain-link fence (invented by England’s Charles Barnard in 1844), a tool that is alternately employed to keep people inside some places and outside of others, plays the part of the sea and the sky, which both divide and unite.  I tried to capture guitarist Dick Dales “the boom of the barrel and the hiss of the lace”, as he described the ocean.  Negative space is created above and positive space is created below, though there’s really no difference between negative and the positive space anyhow, nor between above and below.  Like people, things are more closely related than we credit them for.

The airy cloisterocity at the top of the painting describes the feeling I experienced at Bristol Cathedral, when energy fills the brain, pure and unembellished by the senses.

Title: Virgil Quick Come See, There Goes Rubbery Lee
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2018

Frankness is the child of honesty and courage.     – Robert E. Lee

When we left off last episode in this redirection of his myth, our hero with a thousand faces, the unflappable (he could not be flapped) Robert E. Lee and his magical wonder-horse Traveller had bcome colorized and were flying willy Lincoln – I mean willy nilly (if only a tad) — in a room that wracks and rocks like the stage at an Ornette Coleman concert I once attended.

The roof is gone and inside is outside, like in a Donald Roller Wilson dream painting (and like in some of my own dreams).  Our heroes are inside a flag, if you ever wondered what the inside of an American flag looks like.

If Trigger – I mean Traveller — appears agitated, it’s because a horse divided against itself cannot stand it, if I may misquote my old friend Abraham.

Speaking of Abraham, can you tell me where he’s gone?  He freed a lot of people …