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

Material: Oil on canvas

Date: 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 exists 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.

 

              Title: Amazing Grace:  portrait of Aretha Franklin

Size: 64×30

Medium: Oil on wood

Date: 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 and 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, scoring 20 #1 hit singles and earning 18 Grammies 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

                                       

Don  Size: 46×70

Material: Oil on wood

Date: 2021 SOLD

 

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?

     

                                                                                      Title: American Got Sick                                                                                              

Size: 66×46

Material: Oil on canvas

Year: 1994, 2021

 

All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

— Grant Wood

I once showed up for the reception for my solo show at a trendy restaurant/ wine bar/ gallery, and found the place packed with people, bristling with cameras and awash with light.  I was quite flattered that I should be the center of such attention until I learned that the hubbub was not for me, and that it was no longer my solo show.  The restaurant/ wine bar/ gallery owner had hung, in a prominent spot on a wall, a crude (but nicely framed) crayon drawing her very young daughter had done, and it was her show now.  The media attention was all for her.

This painting, which was part of that show, is intended to condemn, rather than condone or make light of domestic violence, or abuse in any form, a point I had to make that evening when I was cornered and grilled by a couple Guerilla Girls, who are a feminist group of artists and activists from New York City, who happened to be in town.  I was ultimately cleared of all charges, but I made a note of the fact that I won’t always be available to defend or explain my work, and I need to anticipate potential misunderstandings from the start.  A mis-take is still a take.

Though it’s been lampooned over the years beyond all recognition (LOYBAR?), I, in this painting, update Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”, a classic painting that symbolizes stability in the Heartland, to instead portray a less romantic and more modern condition of trouble, imbalance and intolerance in the same Heartland.   Should we teach tolerance?  Surely, but tolerance isn’t enough.  We must also teach love, and the best way to teach love is to practice love, and practice makes perfect.

The red hat is from International Harvester, or it could be a St. Louis Cardinals hat.  We don’t know.  You see red hats all over the Midwest.

 

 

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.