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.

Title: Teeny Weeny Puccini (#2)
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 48×48
Year: 2017     SOLD

God touched me with His little finger and said ‘Write for the theatre, only for the theatre.’     — Giacomo Puccini

The accompanying quotation sparked this portrait of the artist, played here by Giacomo Puccini, as if that relationship between God and man is rendered by Michelangelo.  Puccini was a quiet and reserved man who wrote loud music for 100-piece orchestras and shrieking women.

I here combine classic Italian shapes, and Eastern circle, for a splash of Orientalism.   The Italian flag colors create the smooth stone tile beneath every Italian’s Farragamo’s.  Flag stone, if you will.  The red and green become less saturated and more satinated at the corners, for a sense of costumery and Milanese fashion.

With such relaxing color and that Vitruvian structure, Giacomo’s not going anywhere, so he sits at a café, leaning against the center-line while trying to keep score between cups of espresso.  The chair that I depict is one of the two hair-pin chairs I’ve used as an easel in my studio for as long as I’ve been painting.

Wa-Tho-Huk: portrait of Jim Thorpe
Material: Oil on wood
Size: 48×24
Year: 2017

Kill the Indian, and save the man.    – Captain Henry Pratt, Carlyle Indian Industrial School

The Sac and the Fox Indians form the Mesquakie Nation.  The Sac (or Sauk) were the Osakiwugis, and the Fox were always the Mesquakie.  Both were driven into the Western Great Lakes region by the Iroquois, and then further west, across the Mississippi, by US expansion.  The Mesquakie Nation produced the athletic genius, Jim Thorpe (Wa-Tho-Huk), who excelled at every sport he tried.  The “C” on his uniform in this painting could stand for his professional football team, the Canton Bulldogs, or for the same town’s Football Hall of Fame, of which he is an inductee, or it might stand for his alma mater, the Carlyle Indian boarding school.  Thorpe struck gold in the 1912 Olympics but had it all taken back because he’d athleted professionally. His medals have now been returned and his records restored, only 110 years later.

I once visited the U.S. Army’s ‘Carlyle Barracks’, hoping to learn more about the Indian School that once existed there, but there was no trace of it other than a baseball uniform in a tiny museum in the former brig.  Given disproportionate space in the museum was a life-size diorama showing a mannequin of a doughboy sitting on his jail cell cot with a black eye and a hangover.  I asked the guards how I could learn more about the school, and they referred me to someone in town who they thought might give a shit. Then they offered me a look at a real Sherman tank (Ironically named for the genius who proposed poisoning Indians with yucky blankets) and a tour of the Omar Bradley Museum, but I didn’t have the time or the interest.  In fact, I was a bit irked, but outrage alone won’t solve the world’s problems, so I left.

That is how this painting drew me in the Boarding School direction, resulting in a youthful Thorpe with his bad, boarding-school haircut, Indian ledger paper drawing, and Western-art style tree in the background.

 

 

Title: WWWD (What Would William Do)?: portrait of William Blake
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 30×24
Year: 2017

Come into my hand

By your mild power; descending down the nerves of my right arm

From out of the portals of my brain, where by your ministry

The eternal great humanity planted his paradise.

— William Blake

A particular High School in Ohio calls themselves the Tygers, which was a Blakean spelling for an animal of the same stripe.  I hope their cheerleaders have a cheer: ‘Tygers, Tygers, Burning Bright!’, but maybe not followed up with Blake’s next line: ‘What Immortal Hand or Eye, Could Frame Thy Fearful Symmetry!’  I instead suggest: ‘Our team is on fire tonight!’

In this painting, I filtered the many color variations of William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” prints (1794) and casted the Artist/Poet/Printer/Mystic himself in the title role, as the Creator.  In the background I brightened the potentially traumatizing, dramatic scene with a Smiley Face playing the part of the Sun.  Here ‘God’ wields a pair of dividers, with which He divides land from sea, good from evil, Republicans from Democrats, Steelers fans from Browns fans, &c.

Title: Yosemite Yin Yang: portrait of Gary Snyder
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36 diameter
Year: 2016

It comes blundering over the / boulders at night, it stays

frightened outside the / range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the / edge of the light.     – Gary Snyder (How Poetry Comes to Me)

This painting is a collision of 2 paintings.  One is a double-inversion of a Half Dome cartoon that I drew and painted long ago, that I called “Fool Moon Over Half Dome”, and the other is a portrait of Beat poet, Zen Buddhist and environmental activist Gary Snyder, sitting on his meditation cushion like a mountain among mountains.  Things become complicated as Gary levitates, the moon occurs in both the foreground and the background, and the scene swirls seamlessly into an asymmetrical, mad, reeling yin yang karmic, dharmic wheel, man.  Look at it go!

The background style and colors are influenced by National Park Service poster art.  The gold veins represent the gold veins of the California Gold Rush and also Japanese wabi sabi (kintsugi), which is the celebration of flaws, as in filling cracks in pottery with solid gold.  All cracks aren’t bad, you know.  Cracks are sometimes how the light gets in, and crackpots can be interesting, in reasonable doses.  Liking one doesn’t mean you have to like them all, so I hope we can still be friends after this.

Don’t ever let anyone try to tell you that being a tree hugger is a bad thing.  In fact, recoil in genuine (or feigned, if it’s all you’ve got) horror if they do.  Tree hugging is a noble thing.  We should all be tree huggers, and tree hugger huggers, and even tree hugger hugger huggers.