Title: A Reasonably Good Likeness of Erik Tuomela
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 30×22
Year: 2009 SOLD

We fought for home, faith and fatherland.     – Carl Gustav Mannerheim

In World War II, neutral little Finland was backed into a courageous fight for survival with a neighbor more than 50 times its size, Russia.  All Russia wanted was control over Germany’s access to Leningrad, which they ultimately achieved, but with great loss on both sides.  My mother’s cousin, Erik Tuomela, left his blood on the snow.  By which I mean he died.

Behind him is painted a map showing the snow and lakes of eastern Finland.  Or maybe it’s sky and smoke.  Such decisions I leave to the paintbrush.  Like I once said Bob Ross once said I said, “The paintbrush never lies.”  Not unless it’s drunk.  Then I don’t know what to believe.

 

Title: Show Me the Monet
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 24×24 (x 4 panels)
Year: 2004

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.  When I felt I had enough cards I determined to press into action, and did so.     – Claude Monet

These four same-but-different panels are a remake of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s iconic “Haystack” series, simplified into three colors to suggest different seasons, times and moods, just like he did.  The paint surface is very rough with brush strokes, for greater authenticity.

Oui?  No?

 

 

Title: Green Bodhisattva in Repose
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 64×54
Year: 2003  Sold

In the mind there is no distinction of east and west;  people create distinctions out of their own minds and believe them to be true.

— Buddha

This piece is a meditation on meditation on peace and meditation.

This is the first painting where I consciously centered the subject on its chakras as opposed to centering the subject left-to-right and top-to-bottom, as would a grade schooler with objects in a diorama constructed out of a shoe box for a class project.  Let’s not play slippery with the facts (my computer never lets me anyhow) — we really don’t have as much control over things as people who look through telescopes and microscopes will have you believe.  They can tell us how, but they can’t tell us why.  Nobody knows why, or how.

The subject of this painting, Kuan Yin, I saw in Boston’s art museum.  The next day she and I spent some quality time together in the bus station before I ran out of quarters.

Her green coloration occurred to me while I was hiking one time in Sedona’s Boynton Canyon, so please do not mistake her for Green Tara.  The color is just a coincidence.  A kosmik koinkidink.  She’s just a wood-nymph bewitchingly sprung into life, that’s all.  But now is a good time to bring this up:  that thing about Sedona’s earth energy vortices? — It’s for real.  Trust me – I’ve been to Boynton Canyon, where I discovered one new primary and three more secondary colors.  The stacked, Asian perspective in the background is so damn flat, it looks like it was shot with the centerfield camera in Fenway Park then driven over on Mass Av. by a steam roller.  What a way to go.

Saint Ambrose: portrait of Ambrose Bierce
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 66×48
Year: 2002

imagination, n.:  A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. — Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary)

Writer Ambrose Bierce has the best “bad hotel” story I have heard.  After recovering from a head wound received in the Battle of Chickamauga in Northern Georgia during the Civil War, he caught up again with Sherman’s army following the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.  Being a staff officer, he was entitled to a hotel room, so he checked into the Kennesaw Hotel in Marietta (which is still there).  He got his key at the desk, was wished a pleasant stay by the clerk, and found his room, only to discover that it was stacked floor-to-ceiling with bodies of dead soldiers from the field hospitals in the recent battle.  So, he complained at the front desk, and he requested and received a different room, hopefully, one that Housekeeping had gotten to.  I hope he got extra hotel points and a couple drink vouchers, as well.

After tipping the bellhop (after all, Major Bierce ordered some room service and watched “Gone With the Wind”.

Bierce started out as an Indiana farm boy, then was promoted to wartime traumas in the Civil War where Indiana boys were used as cannon fodder, which was a sweet deal for a Hoosier.  He then became a short story writer, then a snarky San Francisco journalist extraordinaire (obits were his specialty), and then finally, in his final job, he was a correspondent embedded in Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico.  He was never heard from again.  This is all dutifully reported, in one way or another, in the painting I call “St. Ambrose”.  He stands here, in his splendor, in Emilio Zapata pose and color, in the glory of Our Lady of Guadalupe, on a pile of dead Civil War hats.  Isn’t he magnificent?

* He is not to be confused with the original St. Ambrose (Aurelius Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan), so be not to confuse the two.  A much different agency is at work here.

Sherman and Peabody
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 60×48
Year: 2001

I find that I am sometimes so fascinated with painting that it amounts to pain to lay down the brush, placing me in doubt whether I had better stop now before it swallows all attention, to the neglect of my duties.  — William Tecumseh Sherman

In 1864 General William Tecumseh Sherman suckered Confederate general John Bell Hood out from a great defensive position and proceeded to wreck his army, right where you are presently standing, if you are standing near Peachtree Creek in Atlanta.  Sherman feigned to expose his flank, but then he moved a brigade overnight and plugged the hole.  The next morning Hood ordered an attack on the previously exposed flank, but ran smack into this new brigade and got trapped in the ravine.  One might say John Bell was Hood-winked.  Hood and his army fell off the map for a while, but turned up again, this time bearing down on Nashville, which was over 200 miles away, but they were so spent by then that they were easily crushed.  Sherman, meanwhile, had turned the opposite direction and was bearing down on Savannah, which was 250 miles away.  He marched with 60,000 soldiers in two parallel columns spaced 30 miles apart.  Since each column had a 15 mile reach, they cut a swath of total destruction 60 miles wide. Sherman had already confiscated 100 locomotives and 1000 railcars, which he sent to Chattanooga, and now he had a herd of 10,000 mules in tow.  Each mule = one farm tractor to today’s farmer.  Think about that.

Pictured here is a tense meeting between the seldom-patient General Sherman and the equally talkative Mr. Peabody from the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”, in front of Peabody’s Way-back Machine (time machine).  Sitting in for Peabody’s usual sidekick, also named Sherman, is the genuine article, Uncle Willie Sherman himself.  Unfortunately, Peabody’s observations that day were either not recorded or are lost to history, and Sherman hated losing, even if it took the form of losing observations to history.  Choose your myths wisely, my friend.

 

Title: El Sombrero es Rojo
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 30×72
Year: 2000 SOLD

Someone had to do it.  That son of a bitch killed my president.  – Jack Ruby

This painting is an elongated version of a detail from my first painting, “Surreal Thing”, depicting JFK’s assassin’s assassin, Jack Ruby.  I put the subject to service here as a basic textbook Spanish lesson, “El sombrero es rojo.”  “The hat is red.”  I can’t brush up on your Espanol for you, you know.  Only you can do that.

This painting was shown before it was completed, in the interest of opportunity, and sold shortly thereafter, so the painting remains open-ended, which is not the same as being nonfinito.  It now enjoys a place of prestige in the growing Cool Antolic Collection of Art (CACA).

Otra vez, repeta clase:  “El sombrero es rojo …”

 

Pieta Kalevala; the Lamentation of Lemminkainen
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 56×64
Year: 1998

A song works across time the way a painting works across space … The song tells me what to do.  The less my brain is involved, the more I trust the music.  Often, I don’t know what the song is about until after it’s done, and not even always then.     – Jean Sibelius

This collision of earth and sky myths (Nordic pagan and Catholic Christian) was inspired after seeing Michelangelo’s delicate, so seemingly lighter-than-air Pieta in Rome, and then seeing in Helsinki a rigidly-posed attempt to reproduce that masterpiece, that someone had whittled from a couple birch logs and painted with the tail of a wolverine.

The New Testament and Finland’s Kalevala mythology serve as the distorted mirror texts that spawned this comment on a mother’s love and forgiveness.  Jesus and Lemminkainen were both mama’s boys who ran afoul, died and were reborn, each in his/His own way.  Jesus rode into Jerusalem, then things went all screwy, with unfortunate results.  The feisty hunter Lemminkainen defied his mother Kyllikki’s advice and unsuccessfully fought a monster in the waters of Tuonela.  Both mothers grieved and forgave — Lemminkainen was re-assembled and Jesus was reborn, to live on for only three more days.

A bunch of superstitious hooey generated by ignorant peasants to pass the time you say?  Would you say that if you learned that Finns believed the world emerged from a duck’s egg?  Or that our God-man molded the earth from a mud-ball and set it a-twirl?  I think the truth is somewhere between.

This canvas takes its shape to suggest that it might have been “liberated” from a church in war-torn Europe.  Jesus–Lemminkainen and Mary—Kyllikki both wear traditional Finnish costumes in this painting.

Pieta Kalevala was also informed by the moving first movement of Henryck Gorecki’s Third Symphony (“Songs of Sorrow”), about mothers losing children.  (The bass strings sob for the first 10 minutes, then the soprano Dawn Upshaw finishes you off.  Listen and weep.)