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 The Steel City’s very fair-haired son, 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.   My fake registration marks have separated into a Steelers logo – I’m sure you noticed that.

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 Firzpatrick had us sketch endlessly with soft 4B pencils on newsprint paper, 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.  Which Michelangelo would have willingly delivered.

 

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 us all 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 some Cub Scout and is used to train surgeons in Ivy League medical 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.

Hay preguntas?  (Any questions?)

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.  It is better to be talked about than not be talked about.

I use basic shapes, mechanical movement and naturally derived decoration to suggest Art Deco of the 1920’s and 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.  What’s the viewer going to do about it anyway?  You’re a bunch of chimps.  You love bright colors, and the more the better.  The bigger picture is, 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 the greater good of humankind.

Title: Don’t Drink the Water if You Can’t Stem the Tide
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 56×42
Year: 2017

I sit down at my desk at 9 a.m. and the muse has learned to be on time. —  Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Tchaikovsky is always shown in white tie at a premier or some other grand event, surrounded by European nobility and Imperial Russian elite, and framed in red and gold.  Not so with his colleague Mussorgsky, who was Modest.  (“Modest” was Muggorsky’s surname.  Get it?)  Here Pete relaxes at Lake Geneva, wearing a robe of the colors of the mid-winter holiday he co-created with Charles Dickens.  (I’m referring to Christmas.)  He died from drinking a tainted glass of water, some say deliberately because of his sexual orientation in an intolerant society.   Maybe he was just thirsty.

Air, sea and snow are roughly suggested in this painting, but it’s up to the viewer (who is you) to assemble and make sense of these elements.  Sorry. Did you think life in czarist Russia should be easy?  The frontal, waist-up composition suggests iconic Russian icon art, complete with a halo (or two) looking for a head, with both halos melting and dripping their gold all over him.  I varied some of the shadings from left to right to add some visual warpage to this otherwise flat picture.

Is that a broken cross of Pyotr’s forehead?  I don’t know, maybe you can ask Ratspukin next time you see him in a vision.

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.  An updated character from an abolitionist poster (printer Josiah Wedgwood’s invention, not mine), appeals for freedom to the two celebrity abolitionists, public intellectuals and siblings — Harriet Beecher Stowe sits in the Lincoln Memorial chair and Henry Ward Beecher dreamily ponders his next lecture.  Or dalliance.  (*Abe’s chair is made from marble, though many people take it for granite.)

A chain-link fence (*Invented in England by Charles Barnard in 1844, btw), a tool that is alternately employed to keep people inside some places and outside of others, in this story plays the part of the sea and the sky, which both divide and unite.  I tried to capture surf 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, opposites are more closely related than we credit them for.  They define one another, you know.

The heady airiness at the top of the painting describes the feeling I experienced in the cloister at Bristol Cathedral in England, when energy fills the brain, pure and unembellished by the senses.  (*Cary Grant was born in Bristol, btw.)

 

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 redirected myth, our hero with a thousand faces and one major character flaw, the future Hat-head Hall of Fame inductee, the unflappable (he could not be flapped, though he did experience a flap-lapse at Gettysburg), The Old Man himself, The Grey Fox, The Great Typhoon, The King of Spades — Robert E. Lee and his magical wonder-horse, Trigger – I mean Traveler had become colorized and were flying, willy Lincoln – I mean willy nilly (if only a tad) off of their pedestal in a room that wracks and rocks like Stonewall Jackson’s ambulance at Chancellorsville.  (My favorite is “King of Spades”, dubbed so by his soldiers due to Lee’s practice of making them dig in everywhere they went.  Of Jackson’s mortal injuries at Chancellorsville, Lee observed that Jackson lost his left arm, but he (Lee) lost his right arm.  Funny stuff, eh?  Jackson’s arm started to stink, so it was buried at Chancellorsville, where you can still go to pay your respects, and what remained of Stonewall was buried in Lynchburg, Virginia.  They stuffed Jackson’s blunder-horse, Sorry – I mean Sorrel, and stuck him in the VMI museum.)

The roof is gone and inside is outside, not unlike the ceilings that are always absent in a Donald Roller Wilson dream painting (and like some of my own dreams), though in DRW’s paintings animals are frequently smoking cigarettes and have olives balanced atop their heads.  I don’t know why.  In his statements, he’ll point out that a certain animal is smoking, in case we didn’t notice this, I suppose.  Our Heroes are here inside a flag, if you ever wondered what the inside of an American flag looks like.  Inside a Confederate flag, it’s too dark to read, which may explain a lot of things.

If Trigger appears agitated, it’s because a horse divided against itself cannot stand it, if I may misquote my old friend Abraham.  Speaking of whom, can you tell me where he’s gone?  He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young.

 

Title: Singin’ in the Snow
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×24
Year: 2018    SOLD

I never wanted to be a dancer… I wanted to be a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.     – Gene Kelly

Like Gene Kelly, I also wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Kelly wanted to take Arky Vaughn’s place.  I planned to replace Gene Alley when he retired, but Alley wrecked his throwing arm and quit when I was only twelve, so that derailed me from my career path.  It was all for the better – Alley had a throwing arm like a cannon, whereas mine was more like a volcano.  My junior high school counselor recommended a career in bull fighting instead, and I’ve had to fight some form it every day of my life.

In this commissioned piece, Gene Kelly is shown singing (and dancing) in the snow at the corner of State and Madison in the Windy City, Chicago, a week before the Cubs’ home opener.

The architecture is brick – years ago Chicagoans learned the hard way that brick doesn’t burn — and the trim is painted with surplus Conrail blue.  As for Gene’s parka, one should dress visibly when singing (and dancing) in the streets at night.  Plus, during the winter months, Chicagoans dress like they expect to have to change a tire or shovel snow at any moment.

That’s a compliment, Cub fans.  Thank me.

 

The World is a Casserole of Color
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2017

I know that life isn’t a World’s Fair of delights, but I think it should be and I hope it will be.    – Walt Disney

Contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney’s body is not cryogenically frozen.  That’s just a bourbon legend.  He was cremated and his ashes were taken to Burbank to be broadcast by NBC through its affiliates.

We didn’t have Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, and John Hughes movies when I grew up.  I was raised on and by Walt Disney, everybody’s uncle, whose theme song began, “The world is a carousel of color …”   I became so oversaturated and drunk with Walt Disney, that all his mastery, and even some mistakes, occupies an oversized dumpster in the back of my brain.

“… History, comedy, fantasy,” the song continues.  In this animation cel-like cartoon within a cartoon, Walt Disney may or may not be filming one of his fantasies.  I borrowed a few moves from some of Disney’s feature-length cartoons in this painting, such as Alice in Wonderland and Bambi, and the red-and-yellow band uniform Mickey wore on the Mickey Mouse Club.  But weren’t red and yellow also the colors of communism, which Walt railed against in the 1950s?   And wasn’t “Bambi” banned in Nazi Germany, under the belief it would weaken children?  See where this is going?  I sure don’t.

I have an early memory of getting up the courage to approach a man at our church who was well-known for animating early McDonald’s commercials and Gerald McBoing-Boing (I think it was) cartoons.  I told him that I wanted to someday work as a cartoonist for Walt Disney.  “No, you don’t,” was his curt reply.

Eight-balls are no rarer than 5’s, 14’s, or any other balls, I always say.  But if I’ve learned anything from Walt Disney over the years, it’s being a troubled genius is well worth the trouble.

 

 Seven Susans of Seneca Falls
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36×60
Year: 2017

Forget conventionalism, forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.   – Susan B. Anthony

There are 4 billion Susan B. Anthony’s in the Naked City and these are just seven of them, who I call “The Seven Susans of Seneca Falls”.

Susan B.’s humble grave is buried two miles from where I am writing this.  The day following any election (which the day I wrote this happened to be), her headstone becomes completely covered with the little, round “I VOTED” stickers that poll workers reward voters with.  Expecting this, grounds keepers now slip a plastic “condom” over her headstone to accept all these stickers, so those same stickers can be re-used four years hence.

In this painting, eyeglasses become links in a chain, for a common vision, and water flows from Susan’s hearts, then swirls and bubbles about to trim her clothing, in another connection, this one referring to Seneca Falls, NY, which was not Susan’s birthplace, but rather where the movement for women’s voting and other rights were birthed.  The water also connects woman and earth.  Do not take this lightly.

There’s a lot of Upstate New York in this painting, with its 19^th century traditions in water-cures, free love, new high thinking, high love, free thinking, love thinking, new thought, plain living, ditch digging, phrenology, traveling clairvoyance, Christian science, utopianism, spiritualism, atheism, mesmerism, harmonialism, inverted mysticism, deism, Mormonism, aesthetic materialism, evangelicalism, illuminism, political and social activism, conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, Marxism, romanticism, neoclassicism, symbolism, schismism, and yes, even Swedenborgianism.  All of which also happen to be ingredients of Walt Whitman’s poetry.  He contained multitudes, you know.