Title: Mer Mediterranee
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 30×48
Year: 1991 SOLD

All men owe honor to the poets – honor and awe, for they are the dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.   – Homer  (the Odyssey)

“Mer Mediterranee” reports on my experience at the Mediterranean shore while visiting Nice on the French Riviera.  The water was sticky, the air looked sulphuric, and the un-sculpted gravel beach dropped off so sharply into the waves that I actually had to save a child who fell off the beach and into the wine-dark sea.  The child’s mother, already irked at some Japanese businessmen who were trying to photograph her in her pride, was less grateful than I expected her to be.   Sea la vie say the old folks.

This painting is now a part of the Star Collection of Artistic Masterpieces (S.C.A.M.) of Alexandria, Virginia.

 

 

 

 

Title: Untitled
Material: oil on canvas
Size: oil on canvas
Year: 1990

We only kill each other.     – Bugsy Siegel

“Untitled” started out as a portrait of Bugsy Siegel having a bad heir day and wound up as something like an Unknown Soldier of everyday life.

I chose to use putrid colors with names known only to Charon the ferryman, to suggest a cold, lifeless hospital basement room with way too much fluorescent lighting.  Such colors could use the work, so I sometimes oblige them.

But I don’t know —  I may have really painted myself into a coroner this time.

 

 

Title: Zhou and Dick
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 64×72
Year: 1990 SOLD

One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.     – Zhou Enlai

“Zhou and Dick” was conceived (as was our daughter) following a trip to Beijing in 1989, after the dust at Tiananmen Square had settled.  In fact, I was one of 3 visitors on the 100-acre plaza when it was reopened the day after the army left.  We had watched the PLA’s convoys grind past our hotel the middle of the night before, with soldiers standing in the back of what appeared to be dump trucks.   There being no line that day, we were granted a look at the Great Helmsman himself (Mao) in his mortified state.   They could have made him look as good as Snow White, but instead he looked like a half-eaten plate of General Tsao’s pork, so I know it was really him..

Nixon was also in Beijing when we were there, and we saw him on Chinese television, chatting with Deng Xiaoping one evening, right after the Grain Report.  Tonnage was up and the future looked great.  I hadn’t seen Tricky Dick in a number of years and he looked frail and gray.  I was reminded of Nixon’s outreach to China in 1972, when the clumsy, wooden leader of the Western World supped with China’s ailing genius of politics and diplomacy, Zhou Enlai.  Here were the greatest politician that ever lived and the weirdest.

I here include details from my own dinners in China, with the cigarette pack begging for a Raymond Loewy re-design were it not 50 years too late, and the orange pop, bottomless juice glasses of thin local beer, mystery broths and a graceful and smiling host.  The table cloth is red in my retelling of the event.  Need I explain why?

 

Title: Ytic Kroy Wen 
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 70×48
Year: 1990 SOLD

When music comes to me – ‘the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding’ – that has nothing to do with me, ‘cause I’m just a channel.  The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium … Those moments are what I live for.     – John Lennon

liverpool john ono

sergeant pepper dreamweaver

in new york city

This painting was sold to a builder on Long Island who prefers to remain anonymous, named Vinny “The Hammer” Risotto.

 

 

Title: Fool Moon Over Half Dome
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 56×72
Year: 1990 SOLD

We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through the fabric of illusion.     – Ansel Adams

“Fool Moon” is a colorization of a black-and-white Ansel Adams subject, with red added to turn my own painting into a comment on our misguided environmental attitudes.

This painting once went missing with ten others when the owner of the gallery where they were showing had to flee creditors.  I’d rented a truck to remove and ship home my paintings, but I found the gallery padlocked and bare.  After receiving an anonymous phone tip later that same day, I located the paintings in the basement of a local restaurant, with one painting broken in half and this one punctured clear through.  I ultimately repaired and sold both.  Months later I bumped into the gallerist again, only he had gone to extremes to alter his appearance by growing a goatee, wearing glasses, and re-shaping his hairline – he was now bald on the top of his head with the world’s worst comb-over.

We all have our sad vanities to pursue.  Or avoid.

 

 

 

Title: Wonton Violence
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 44×72
Year: 1989

 

I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.     – Lyndon Johnson

In 1994, I was confronted at a Columbus solo show of mine by a Vietnam veteran who demanded to know how I had the audacity to portray a satirical scene from a war I did not attend.  I explained to him that this was my own twelve-year-old’s evening news experience of seeing the same event, but backwards and in flip-flops, and he was satisfied enough to let me off with a stern warning.  A short time later, a carpenter offered me sex in exchange for the same painting, but I sure took advantage of him – I sold him a forgery!  What a sucker!  I’m lying, by the way — Gallant politely declined the offer.

 

 

 

Title: Aiti Pullankanssa
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 72×60
Year: 1989

 

The major concern was to create a monument which would have lasting significance and would be a landmark of our time.  Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose.  But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.     — Eero Saarinen

Me and my Eero.   Aiti was my Finnish grandmother.  ‘Aiti’ means ‘Mother’, ‘pulla’ is Finnish coffee bread, ‘kansa’ means ‘with her’, and ‘molopaa’ means ‘dickhead’.  So “Aiti Pullankansaa” means “Mother with Her Coffee Bread”.   But I speak none of that tangled coat-hanger of a language, and Finns rarely speak at all, so reality in Aiti’s dark, wooden house tended to slowly spiral into a point of nothing like a snake consuming itself tail-first.  But there are no snakes in Finland.  None that I know of, anyhow.  I’m certain there are no grasshoppers, thanks to St. Urho, who drove them out.  This is well-documented.  Unless we wanted to watch baseball with my grandfather Ukki (“Grandfather”) we could read a book on the porch or, if we were really bored, wander up by the Fineview schoolyard and sportingly present ourselves to be beaten by the city kids for mocking their inarticulate attempts at verbal insults, while enjoying the view, which was fine indeed.

 

Title: I Was Here I Am: portrait of Quanah Parker
Material: oil on canvas
Size: 66×66
Year: 1988

This painting was prompted by a dream in which a Native American questioned me as to why I was on his land.