This is a painting of our youngest grandson with my cat. It is based on a photo from several years ago, when Elijah was just a little boy and Skittles was just a kitten.
Original painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $250
SOLD
Marie is a former co-worker of Bethann. She and her husband, Pete, retired to Lewes, Delaware, a part of the state affectionately referred to as LSD, Lower Slower Delaware. It has a small, historically preserved, shopping district with an independent, used book and novelty store, a toy store, ice cream shop, several restaurants, antique and art dealers, etc. There is a super quilting fabric shop, close to the beach. The beach is on an inlet, so no rough surf or undertow. It is calm and perfect for little children and old folk, whose knees don’t like to get knocked about. There are vineyards and wildlife sanctuaries to tour. There are a pool and a pond in Pete and Marie’s community. Lewes just happens to be the same town where Fr. Boniface and Khouriye Joyce Black started St. Andrew’s, and where our friends, Fr. Herman & Khouriye Vera Acker now serve. I helped build and design the Holy Table for St. Andrew’s as well as the side tables. I made the icons for the mission before they had a building. So this falls into the “small world” category.
But, back to our story. If it were not for Pete & Marie, we would not be able to have any sort of vacation for the last several years. They invite us down. We have a great time with them. They are a great, loving couple. We have gotten to know their daughter, Jen, as well. She lives not far from us, in PA. Pete & Marie have been married for over 40 years. One day, Pete left the house with our son-in-law, Vince, me, and our two granddaughters to walk over to the pool on the other side of the pond. We hear the garage door open and Marie holler, “I love you, Pete!” He hollers back, “I love you, Marie!” I look at him. He said, “We always kiss each other whenever one of us leaves the house. I forgot to. So …” Now that’s sweet.
This painting in acrylic on 14″ x 11″ stretched canvas. It is not for sale. Jen is taking it down to her parents for us as a “thank you” gift.
Anthony McNeal is a dear friend. I don’t know how long ago we met. He was homeless. I was leading The King’s Jubilee, serving meals in center City Philadelphia. Tony managed to go to Philadelphia Community College to receive several certifications in computer use and maintenance. He is also a skilled, bicycle repairman and a cook. He got a job cooking at Tindley Temple UMC‘s kitchen which provided meals a couple of days a week to homeless people. He moved into an apartment with another man who had been homeless, when he got a Section 8 apartment, to share expenses. Tony started to help us serve on the street, when he was still on the street himself, and continued when he moved into the apartment. He was always a cool head to help maintain order and help keep everyone safe. When the city required food safety training, he took the course with me, so he could take charge when I could not make it.
When my health took a turn for the worse, he would come up to our home in Souderton and do the heavy chores that needed doing. Many times, he helped me cook the soup for the street or took over the task entirely, at our house. Sometimes, he brought his uncle, Steven Johnson, to help, as well. Tony has accompanied me to WXPN’s Exponential Music Festival for a few years. He also came with me to Philly Socialists’ retreat in West Virginia a couple of years ago. He is always happier when he is serving, so he pitched in and cooked the whole Labor Day weekend.
Tony is a joy to know. Everyone of our friends and family who has met him, became his friend, too.
A few years ago, Tony invited me to his birthday party at his dad’s house. When we arrived, they were surprised by the fact that I am white. They asked Tony why he failed to mention this. He said, “I forgot. I don’t think of Cranford as white.”
The painting is acrylic on 14″ x 11″ stretched canvas.
Tony is still not happy with me about how I cut off the top of his head in this painting. It communicates his height. I was standing that close when I took his photo in the hallway at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I also gave him more white hair than he had yet. He is getting there.
SOLD. I gave it to Tony’s daughter and granddaughter.
I never met Jamie. I met her husband, Mike, who is our son-in-law Vincent’s good friend and work mate. Mike is a bright, young man with a quick wit and a curious mind with diverse interests. He is energetic and hard-working. He loves Jamie. We have had some rough, Nor’easter blizzards that hit our corner of Bucks County, Pennsylvania hard the end of February into March.
Jamie had sleep apnea and used a machine to assist her breathing at night. The storm knocked the power out in Mike and Jamie’s apartment during the night. Jamie’s machine lost power. She stopped breathing and died at just 34 years old. Her husband lost his wife. Her parents lost their daughter. Her brother lost his sister. Her niece lost her aunt. I remember when my sister died, my dad sobbing and saying, “Parents are not supposed to bury their children.”
Corporations have battery back-ups for phone systems and hard drives. Many of us have battery back-ups for Fios phones. Why are battery back-ups not standard issue for life-sustaining equipment? It seems like a small, additional cost. We have the technology. It’s too late for Jamie Standish, but perhaps in her memory, we could get the ball rolling to improve the standard of care. Call me a curmudgeon, but I think we can care for our citizens at least as well as we care for their billing data.
Rest in peace, Jamie, only with us for a short time: August 11, 1983 to March 2, 2018.
This is acrylic on 10″ x 10″ stretched canvas. It is not for sale. It was painted in memory of Jamie as a gift to Mike, using my “heroes palette”.
I met Ethel Haanpaa in 1971 when I started dating her granddaughter, Becky Shostrom. I was 16. Becky was 17. Becky lived in her own apartment upstairs from her grandma Ethel and her step-grandpa Emil in their chocolate brown duplex on 25-1/2 Ave. No. in Minneapolis. Becky and I were both members at Fourth Baptist Church, which was then located at 21st and Fremont, just 4-1/2 blocks away. We were extremely involved in the youth group and in the church, which was extremely fundamentalist. Ethel was a member of First Baptist Church, downtown, which was more “liberal”. Emil didn’t go to church. He was a retired, union taxi and bus driver. He was a character. We disagreed on just about everything, but we had great, friendly discussions. I learned so much about honesty, character, tolerance and love from this old couple and their friends.
On the morning of the day of my sister’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high-rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.
When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told our priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage.
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This portrait of Jim Morrison of The Doors is based on his mugshot from an arrest in Las Vegas on Jan. 28, 1968, when he was 24. It showed up on Facebook a few years ago. I saw it and shared it with the comment: “The most beautiful mugshot I have ever seen!” Several days ago, it came up again in my memories. I shared it again, with the same comment. He is disheveled, but he is staring right through the camera to and through any and all who would ever view the print produced from the film contained therein.
James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, Florida. His father was a rear admiral in the US Navy, so the family moved around a lot. It has been said this is why he had difficulty maintaining relationships. After graduating from UCLA film school, he helped form a rock band and named it The Doors for Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, a reference to psychedelic drug use. He was the lead singer. He was a songwriter and a poet. In a couple of years, they had a smash hit. Jim developed an alcohol dependency, which at times interfered with performances. During a concert in Miami, on March 1, 1969, he tried to start a riot by shouting obscenities and provocations out to the crowd. He was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity, and on October 30, 1970, was sentenced to six months in prison and a $500 fine. He was free on $50,000 bond.
In March 1971, he went to Paris to join Pamela Courson, his sometimes traveling companion. He took long walks and wrote poetry. On July 3, 1971, she found him dead in the bathtub in his apartment. No autopsy was performed. Heart failure was listed as the cause of death. He was 27.
I named this painting Stranger for his song. I have never been a huge Doors fan per se, but I have loved several of their songs. I just was not that aware of who was singing them on the radio. The one that I have always, truly identified with is People Are Strange.
Painting is black & white acrylic on 24″ x 18″ stretched canvas.
Price: $250 plus postage
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Daphne Anne Vella was born in Silema, Malta on August 26, 1964. In 1985, she married attorney Peter Caruana Galizia. They had three sons, Matthew, Andrew, and Paul. In 1990, the family moved to Bidnija in Mosta. She was a political activist, an investigative journalist, and a blogger. Matthew, also, became an investigative journalist.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was fearless and tenacious in her pursuit of truth and justice. She was arrested several times. The front door of her house was set ablaze. Another time the family dog’s throat was slit and laid across the front doorstep. Threatening notes were tacked to her front door, or faxed or emailed to her, telling her to back down on stories or her life was in danger. Her car was set on fire. She did not back down. She was routing out corruption in Malta that had (and has) international, financial and environmental consequences. Some news outlets were too intimidated to carry her stories. In 2008, she set up her own blog, Running Commentary, to be unrestrained in publishing her own stories and opinion pieces.
She revealed on Running Commentary that a prominent Maltese government minister was entangled with unsavory dealings with Panama and New Zealand. This proved to be an embarrassment and true. It was the tip of the iceberg of the Panama Papers. By the time of Daphne’s assassination, there were 48 libel suits outstanding against her. There were also threats intimidating several media outlets, some of which were dropped within hours of her death. Her work in revealing the Panama Papers eventually brought down the government of Iceland and implicated banks and government officials around the world.
On October 16, 2017, at about 3 pm, Ms. Caruana Galizia was assassinated in a car bomb attack while she was driving her leased Peugeot 108 near their home.
In May 2017 Pilatus Bank’s owner and chairman, Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, sued Daphne Caruana Galizia in an Arizona court in his own name and in the name of Pilatus Bank. The case was for $40 million in damages. Ms. Caruana Galizia was never notified about it and it was withdrawn within hours of her assassination. The prime minister has refused to commission an investigation into her death. To this date, her assassination has not been solved. She has received over two dozen posthumous awards and honors in Europe and America for her integrity, and her good and heroic quest for truth as a journalist. There is a thorough article about her story in The New Yorker.
This painting has a red edge, so like the sad, old joke about newspapers, this is “black and white and red all ’round.”
The painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $320 plus postage.
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Since my painting of Aaron Swartz, The Ghost in the Machine, was so well received I painted a 24″ x 24″ black and white portrait of Nina Simone. My hope is that you will find it to be as stark and as powerful as Hozier’s tribute to her and other singers in the US civil rights movement is.
Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003) was born in Tryon, North Carolina to a Methodist minister and a handyman and occasional preacher. She was named Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She learned how to play piano by ear when she was three. She played the piano in church as a child, but did not sing in the choir. By the time she graduated high school as valedictorian of her class, she was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist, as well as a singer. The townspeople raised money to pay for her to go to Julliard, however her family had moved to Philadelphia, so she applied to Curtis instead. They rejected her application. She felt this was due to racism. This killed her hope of being a great, black, woman, classical pianist. She started teaching music to get by. She also started to play and sing at some nightclubs. One night she decided it would help her career to change her name. She chose “Nina” which means “little girl” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actor Simone Signoret.
She wanted her singing to count for something, so she chose and wrote songs to record that addressed racism, lynching and civil and human rights. This was a risk at the time for a young, black woman in the 1950s and 60s. Her recording career spanned four decades. Her rendition of Strange Fruit is haunting.
“We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk.”
-Nina Simone
For more of her bio and discography, check out www.ninasimone.com.
The painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $320 plus postage.
SOLD!
Nelson Mandela gets credit for ending apartheid in South Africa, but he couldn’t have done it without Steve Biko, and many others inspired by him, who put their lives on the line. Part of his story is told in the movie Cry Freedom! starring Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington. He was beaten to death by the police while being held in custody for the crime of teaching black children to read.
Biko (December 18, 1946 – September 12, 1977) was also responsible for starting the Black Consciousness movement. In the US, this manifested itself as “Black is Beautiful”.
Steven Bantu Biko was also the inspiration for Peter Gabriel’s hit song Biko.
This portrait is in my “Heroes” series.
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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Marielle Franco (27 July 1979 – 14 March 2018) was shot to death, along with her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, on March 14 of this year, in her home district, where she served as a city councillor of the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro for the Socialism and Liberty Party from January 2017 until her death. She had just delivered a speech against police brutality and extrajudicial killings. She died of 3 shots to the head, one to the neck. The bullets used to kill them were Federal bullets. They tried to concoct a story that they had been stolen from a post office facility where they had been stored, but the Post Office would not cooperate with the Federal Government’s false story.
Marielle has been working tirelessly and cheerfully for years for the rights of the poor, ever since a close friend was killed by a stray bullet in 2000. She rose out of the favelas; and went to college and university on scholarships as a single mother. She had a daughter in 1998. She wrote her master’s thesis on taking back the favelas from the gangs. In 2007, she entered politics by working for State Representative Marcelo Freixo. She identified as bi-sexual. On the City Council, she had fought against gender violence and tried to create a day of lesbian visibility in August 2017. It failed 19-17. She was planning on marrying her long-term partner, Mônica Tereza Benício, in September 2019.
Marielle was politically savvy and knew she needed well placed friends. She became friends with Glenn Greenwald. He listed what he referred to as the “most important subjects to cover” regarding Franco’s assassination stating:
“Her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to military intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazil’s power structure, but to subvert it.”
The Federal Police sadly proved the truth of Marielle’s last speech by so immediately assassinating her and her driver. But as Medgar Evers said, “You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.” Sadly, in the era of Trump, we still need to say it: Women are equal.
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 16″ stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage.
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I painted this portrait of Rachel Carson while sitting at a picnic table in Menlo Park at Perkasie Pennsylvania’s Earth Day observance, yesterday. Earlier in the week, on Kid’s Corner, on WXPN Radio, I had heard the history of Earth Day and learned that there would never have been an Earth Day had it not been for Rachel Carson, and her scientific insights and tenacity. Yet she died in 1964 and the first Earth Day was in 1970. It was her book, Silent Spring, which had so caught Sen. Gaylord Nelson’s imagination and empowered his environmentalism.
It was the first time such a book, a scientific and fairly technical book had caught the imagination of the general population of the US. The title was the thing that did it. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and a chemist and had noticed how the pesticides, particularly DDT, accumulated as it traveled up the food chain to the larger, predatory birds, like hawks, vultures and eagles. One of its effects was to reduce the presence of calcium, so that the egg shells were so soft that they would be crushed in the nest during incubation. Theoretically, with the continued overuse of these pesticides, we could reach the point where we would no longer hear birdsong in the Spring. Another effect was actually making malaria resistant mosquitoes. She testified before the Senate. For this, she was mocked and attacked for being a single woman. Her character was questioned. She was slandered, even though she had made sacrifices to support her widowed mother and sisters through the Great Depression and adopted her orphaned nephew, etc., because she had a good income from her books.
The first Earth Day was not a convenient, fun event on a Saturday or Sunday to remind us to Reuse, Reduce, Recycle (which is a dubious tactic which only slows the path of consumer goods to ever-growing landfills). It was on a Wednesday. Over 20,000,000 Americans took part. No one really knows for sure how many. It was organized and ‘documented’ before the days of the internet or cellphones in schools of all levels. Many turned it into Earth Week, like the University of Minnesota did, with a week-long environmental “teach-in” and fair. I helped organize our Earth Day (April 22) at Carl Sandburg Junior High in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We started by hundreds of us, who normally rode the bus to school, walked and picked up litter as we came in and as we went home. That day, about half of the classes were taught outdoors and the lessons involved environmental, conservation or ecological themes. About 100 of us vowed to permanently abandon the buses and either bicycle or walk for the rest of the school year. This actually did reduce emissions as most of these were students who were those involved in after school activities who would quite often get special activity bus rides home, which now could be eliminated.
Earth Day was the closest thing that the US had ever had to general strike. Pres. Nixon was already under pressure from the Watergate investigation. Earth Day/Week scared him to death. He knew he had to do something about this. By July, he had started the EPA. He knew he could not survive in office if he did not respond to the people on this. DDT was banned. Emission and water purity standards were established. Mileage standards were imposed Speed limits were reduced. Air and water quality dramatically improved. Cancers and other diseases were reduced by millions! Now we have a buffoon in the White House who is trying to undo all of that! And we have a yarn bombing on a Saturday in the park instead of Earth Day.
Rachel Carson was born on May 27, 1907, on her family’s farm near Springdale, PA. She died of complications of breast cancer in her home in Silver Spring, MD, April 14, 1964. This portrait is in my “Heroes” series.
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $125 plus postage.
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Ernesto Che Guevara was born on June 14, 1928. (My birthday in June 14, 1955.) His early life is documented in the book and movie: “The Motorcycle Diaries”, about his travels from one end of South America to the other on a motorcycle. This trip was formative in his education as a revolutionary. He became a medical doctor first. In 1955, Fidel Castro’s brother Raul introduced them, and he joined the revolution in Cuba. On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida March. After he witnessed what Dulles’ CIA did to dismantle the popularly elected socialist governments of Guatemala and Honduras, he persuaded Harvard educated Fidel Castro that he would need to maintain a benign dictatorship to resist the dirty tricks and subversion of the American government with their interference in other nations’ elections.Perhaps our chickens are coming home to roost.
In 1965, then he joined the revolution in Kinshasa, Congo. In 1966, he joined the revolution in Bolivia. He was captured by the CIA on October 8, 1967, and summarily executed the next day. So much for human rights and due process and The Geneva Convention.
Che was a passionate man. He was in the fight for love of the people, not for personal gain or some dogmatic or idealized view of proving a point. I am sick to death of the communist, socialist and anarchist groups in the US who are full of history nerds and armchair philosophers who don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. Che gave his life in service to nations. Because of what he did, thousands, perhaps millions of people were given a shot at life who otherwise would not have done.
“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”
“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” – both by El Che
There was nothing ridiculous about Che’s love for the common people and his passionate struggle to liberate them.
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $60 plus postage
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Mumia Abu Jamal had been a great journalist for WHYY Radio 91.1 FM, the Philadelphia public radio station affiliated with NPR. He was a regular contributor to 91 Report, the local evening news, in the late 1970s. He didn’t pull any punches in his coverage of police corruption, racism and brutality. The police framed him for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. They disallowed testimony from the only impartial eyewitness. They paid a hooker, who wasn’t at the scene, to testify against Mumia. So Mumia was found guilty and given a death sentence. It has since been commuted to a life sentence, without parole. He remains the US’ most famous political prisoner.
I chose to paint him as he appeared as a young man, prior to his incarceration. You can learn more about his case from MOVE’s website.
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
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My playmates for the first six years of my life were my sister Sue Ann and our neighbor across the street, David Ericson. They were two years older than I was. I was the youngest of four in my family. David was the youngest of four in his family. There were other children in the neighborhood, but these were my closest friends and constant companions. Our family built a bigger house and moved two miles away in Golden Valley, MN, the summer between kindergarten and first grade, but we stayed in touch. We spent 4th of Julys together and got together around Christmas and did some other outings, as well. We ended up going to the same high school: Robbinsdale Senior High.
When we were little and playing cowboys and Indians, David always managed to get killed right outside his back door. He would lay there for a moment then he would get up and run into the kitchen and pour some ketchup on his face and lie back down; you know, to add bloody realism. The next time we would come by, he would still be lying there, but he would be scraping the ketchup off with potato chips and eating them. You just can’t waste food like that! There were children starving in Africa.
David’s parents, Lester and Lois prayed for our family daily and brought us kids to church when my folks didn’t go, and to vacation Bible school, to their little Bible church in North Minneapolis. Lois particularly prayed for me daily from the time she heard my mom was pregnant with me until the day she died in December, 2008. I played with David’s toys while he was in school and my mom was working for the 1960 Census. The Ericsons’ house was the safest place I knew as a child. Playing with David’s Lincoln Logs in the middle of the living room floor with Mrs. Ericson in the kitchen was as good as life could get.
David grew up to be a serious, well-mannered, Christian, young man. He graduated RHS, Class of 1971. He decided to take a year off to do a short-term missionary assignment with Wickliffe Bible Translators, helping his sister and brother-in-law, Jim and Carol Daggett, in Peru, instead of starting college. While there, he was accompanying a girl on a flight to Quito, to go to a hospital for an emergency surgery. It was Christmas Eve. The flight went down and we did not know for three weeks what had happened. Finally, we learned that only one German girl survived. The plane had broken up in mid-air in a bad storm. Pieces of the fuselage had fallen from the sky. Her mother died in the seat next to her. She was carrying her wedding cake on her lap. That helped save her. A tribe of natives who were known to be cannibals took her in and treated her wounds. She was finally found and rescued. So we lost David. He died on a mission of mercy. He was Les and Lois Ericson’s only son.
In 2000, my sister Sue Ann committed suicide. I just remember being so much happier and four and saying, “Alison, can you help Sue Ann and me cross the street so we can play with David?”
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
SOLD
As I painted this portrait, I reminisced of a time before my birth. I recalled Grama Dodier’s life from when she was born as a “half-breed” on the prairie of Minnesota in 1880, to when I interviewed her when I was a 12-year-old in the Spring of 1968. I still have a clear vision of her log cabin and her excitement at her French, trapper dad arriving home after a weeks’ long hunting and trading expedition. I can visualize the scene as freshly now as then of her first vision of a motorized vehicle. It was steam-powered. I asked her if her daughters were flappers during the “Roaring 20s”. She laughed. She told me she helped make Irene’s dress. The times had changed and she and her husband had moved to the city (Minneapolis).
I have no photos of Grama Dodier. She is not a relative, but I carry her memories. She was a neighbor’s (two blocks away) mother. I painted her portrait from 49-year-old memories. It is truly amazing how quickly things have changed. She witnessed the first automobiles and now we were heading to the moon. She was an outcast for being a “half-breed’ as a child and young mother. By the 1950s, no one noticed her race because of her French last name. Her daughters married well. She could pass, but the Blacks and the Native Americans were still struggling in Minnesota.
I learned much from Grama Dodier and was careful to preserve these memories as a living link to the past. It is now 2017, so I have a link going back 137 years.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
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John Winston Ono Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was a co-founder of The Beatles and was half of one of the most successful songwriting duos of all time with Paul McCartney. Imagine is nothing if not a communist anthem.
For those of us who grew up in the 60s, there are several events that are etched in our minds. Everyone knows where they were when they saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Everyone knows where they were when they heard the news that John had been shot and killed.
We still have his music and we have lots of work to do.
After the Soviet Union broke up, Abkhazia produced postage stamps with Groucho Marx and John Lennon on them and sold frameable collector sheets with the caption. “The New Marx & Lennon” on the sleeve. I own one. What is funny about this is that both Groucho Marx and John Lennon were Marxists. So I painted a set of portraits of all four of them.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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V. I. Lenin (April 22, 1870 – January 21, 1924) was the revolutionary founder of the Marxist Soviet Union in Russia. The Russian Revolution was an ambitious undertaking and the Soviet Union was an amazing experiment. In the US, the cliché is that communism failed, since the USSR fell.That’s funny, since they don’t seem to draw that conclusion about capitalism looking at 17 trillion dollars debt, millions homeless, countless starving, children in poverty, senior citizens with college debt, endless wars, etc.
No. What was accomplished by Lenin and company was amazing! They took a pre-industrial, feudal economy, and dragged it into the 20th century, turning it into a major, industrial and scientific powerhouse. Russia became a leader in medicine, space, agriculture, education, in a few short decades! And they did this for ALL of their people, not just a wealthy élite. So what did the west do? Threaten them with total annihilation, forcing them to waste resources on weapons and defense.
I chose a less familiar photo of Lenin to portray him. We recognize him more readily without the hat, seeing his bald head. I liked the wool worker’s cap better. I thought it better conveyed his heart and the heart of socialism.
After the Soviet Union broke up, Abkhazia produced postage stamps with Groucho Marx and John Lennon on them and sold frameable collector sheets with the caption. “The New Marx & Lennon” on the sleeve. I own one. What is funny about this is that both Groucho Marx and John Lennon were Marxists. So I painted a set of portraits of all four of them.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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Groucho Marx was the professional name for Julius Henry Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977). He was a writer, comedian, singer, stage, movie and television star. He made 13 films with his brothers Chico and Harpo and a few with Zeppo as well. He was a master of the paraprosdokian.
Late in life, Groucho became friends with Elton John and Alice Cooper. He appeared in a production of Jesus Christ: Superstar of Elton John’s. When it came to the crucifixion, he asked if it ended well. He said this would not make his Jewish friends happy.
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
After the Soviet Union broke up, Abkhazia produced postage stamps with Groucho Marx and John Lennon on them and sold frameable collector sheets with the caption. “The New Marx & Lennon” on the sleeve. I own one. What is funny about this is that both Groucho Marx and John Lennon were Marxists. So I painted a set of portraits of all four of them.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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When one “Bings” Karl Marx, the first thing that comes up is: “Scientist – Karl Marx was a German-born scientist, philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.” One thing is for certain, a lot of misinformation has been circulated about him and what he taught, in capitalist countries. The first word in the description is the most important, however, and, in the end, science always wins, because it is reality. Science does not play favorites, does not discriminate on who your relatives were or how rich your parents were. Thermonuclear war will kill you just as dead whether you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or in a mud hut. Global warming will flood you, starve you, burn you, impoverish, kill you, no matter how many billions of dollars you amass. Science is science. Facts are facts. Alt-nothing! It’s time to share! It’s simple justice! It’s human survival. It’s better for all of us. It’s more secure and happier for all of us.
“There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.” – Karl Marx
After the Soviet Union broke up, Abkhazia produced postage stamps with Groucho Marx and John Lennon on them and sold frameable collector sheets with the caption. “The New Marx & Lennon.” I own one. What is funny about this is that both Groucho Marx and John Lennon were Marxists. So I painted a set of portraits of all four of them.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Mohandas K. Gandhi (Oct. 2, 1869 – Jan.30, 1948) became known as the Mahatma or the “Great Soul” due to his wisdom in leading the people of India in non-violent resistance against British colonial rule in the 1930s and 40s. Gandhi was a great teacher. He wrote many books to train the people for the inner discipline necessary for non-violent civil disobedience. He drew on the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. He was regarded as deeply spiritual, yet he professed faith in no deity or particular religion, saying: “My uniform experience has informed me that there is no other God than Truth.”
It was through Gandhi’s correspondence with two different actors in the resistance to Hitler that I first connected with him; that was Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany and Simone Weil in France. This led me to read his biography and most of his works. I had to learn a fair amount of Hindi to understand them. I came to truly revere the man and fully embrace his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience.
“I object to violence because, when it appears to do good, it is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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Benazir Bhutto (June 21, 1953 – December 27, 2007) was the eleventh prime minister of Pakistan. She was the first modern world leader to give birth while in office. She was the first woman to head a majority Muslim nation. She was a complex character. I painted her because I consider her to be a rare, feminist hero. Malala Yousafzai considers her as one of her heroes and a key role model for her growing up in Pakistan. Benazir was Harvard educated and grateful for it. She had a tough time in her two stretches as prime minister. There were many intrigues, scandals, and attempts on her life. She was assassinated while campaigning for re-election. She fought hard for an independent Pakistan. She was not going to settle for it being a vassal state to the US or being dominated by a nuclear armed India, regardless of with whom that meant she had to deal.
Pakistan, and, indeed, the world, would be a different, and I would surmise a much better place, had Benazir Bhutto not been taken from us so prematurely.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
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Ana Pauker (born Hannah Rabinsohn; December 13, 1893 – June 3, 1960) was called “the most powerful woman in the world” by Time magazine in 1948. She was Romania’s Foreign Minister and the de facto head of the Romanian Communist Party. She was a breast cancer survivor. Her husband, Marcel, was killed for accused of being a Trotskyite in a party purge. They had lived in exile for being communists. She was imprisoned, then exchanged to the Soviet Union, where she trained and became part of the Comintern. When the Red Army entered Romania at the end of World War II, she was there and ready to take leadership as part of the Muscovite faction. She was second in command on the four person Romanian Communist Party Secretariat, but was regarded as the true leader. She was appointed as Foreign Minister, the first woman anywhere in the world to hold such a high level post.
What I find noteworthy about her tenure in these positions is that unlike so many women in positions of power, she did not feel the need to “out piss” the men like so many of the women since her (i.e., Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi, Hillary Clinton). She maintained friendly relations with Stalin and insisted that she was a Stalinist, yet she maintained that Socialist Doctrine allowed for more democracy, so did not force all of the peasant farmers into collectivization. She allowed more time for the five-year plans, and allowed amnesty for Spanish Civil War and French Resistance veterans. She worked toward healing and reconciliation as a path forward for more Romanians, rather than Stalin’s and later Ceaucescu’s hyper-masculinity. Her way was working. Stalin respected her and let her have her way in Romania.
When Krushchev succeeded Stalin in 1953, purges began throughout the Soviet Union and its satellites. Ana Pauker got scapegoated for the harsh policies that the secretariat had enforced which she had actually opposed. She lost her party membership, but her life was spared and she was given a translation job. She protested her innocence and sued unsuccessfully for her membership back. She was an easy target, since she was a woman and of Jewish ancestry. This was a fatal mistake for Romanian communism. The man they installed, Ceaușescu, to take over leadership in Romania was a megalomaniac and a misogynist, who ruined the country for generations. He outlawed abortions and all forms of birth control. He seized the forests as his own, personal hunting grounds to slaughter bears and other game at his whim.
Ana had another cancer in 1959 which culminated in her death on June 3, 1960.
Marcel and Ana Pauker had three children: Tanio (1921–1922); Vlad (1926-2016); Tatiana (1928–2011). Ana had a fourth child, Masha (born 1932 ), fathered by the Czech Communist Eugen Fried. Masha now lives in France. She adopted a fifth child, Alexandru, in the late 1940s.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) has been one of my heroes since I first learned of him when he designed the US exhibit for the 1967 World Expo in Montreal. I was twelve and I read several articles by him and about him. I learned about ephemeralism and synergism and the dymaxion globe and geodesic domes. Most importantly I learned to question authority. All the major and minor powers were and are squandering the resources of the world on war-making. If they would just wake up, they could realize if they spent all those resources on housing, feeding and caring for people, there would be abundance enough to share, and no need to go to war for anything. If we put our minds to “living lightly” on the earth, instead of bleeding her dry, there is plenty to go around for everyone.
Bucky Fuller was trained as an architect. He was known as an author, a systems engineer, an inventor, a philosopher, a scientist, a genius. He didn’t like being called an inventor, though he held dozens of patents. He felt he merely uncovered what was always there, or rearranged existing basic machines. This didn’t seem like a big deal to him, even if he were the first to do it in a certain way to solve a certain problem. He was always working to solve problems. He developed a discipline to rapidly get to REM sleep so he only required two 1 hour naps every day, allowing him 22 waking hours to work.
I painted this based on a photo of Buckminster as a young man, because it was at age 28, when his 4 year-old daughter died of complications of polio that he went through a crisis of depression. He came out of it with a commitment to search for ways to make the world a better place, with an emphasis on affordable housing. He felt his daughter’s death was partly to blame on the poor, damp apartment they were living in.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty.
But when I’ve finished, if the solution isn’t beautiful, I know it’s wrong.”“Man knows so much and does so little.”
“The minute you begin to do what you really want to do,
it’s really a different kind of life.”“Either war is obsolete or men are.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage.
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Mavis Staples is another voice of the civil rights movement. She, along with Arcade Fire, was the first to record a song of resistance to the so-called president Trump, releasing it one day before his inauguration.
It is a song in the prophetic tradition, speaking from the viewpoint of God, as a warning. It can also be understood as the inscription on the wall of the Minnesota state house says: “Vox Populi Vox Dei.” “The Voice of the People is the Voice of God.”
Mavis Staples is no stranger to powerfully speaking truth to the people. She was with her dad, Roebuck Staples, who everyone called “Pops” when he wrote “Freedom Highway” for Martin Luther King, Jr., to start the Freedom March. I painted Mavis on the river stage at the XPoNential Music Festival in July 2016, in Camden, NJ, with the Philadelphia skyline in the background. The festival happened the weekend after the GOP National Convention. Another performer had made the mistake of watching it. Being the sensitive soul that he was, it was more than he could take. He had a full-blown meltdown on stage, and gave a half hour expletive filled rant, instead of performing his set. Well, Mavis took the stage Sunday afternoon and said something along the line of: “Times are looking bad. It’s been a rough week, but I’m here to make you feel good! I’m not promising you it’s going to last, but while I’m up here, you’re going to feel good!” And she said, “Now we’re going to sing a song that we used to sing with Pops and Dr. King in dark times to get to better times.” She started singing, “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me)”, with some added lyrics that sounded like a socialist platform. I was listening on the radio, because I was grounded, due to complications from my heart-valve replacement surgery. I was in tears of joy. Later in the set, she recalled Pops writing of Freedom Highway, then performed it. I should say, she led it. She was really doing her job as a minstrel and prophet and poet in dark times; enthusiastically bringing hope against all odds, and pointing the way upward. She said she started singing with her sisters in 1966 and wasn’t done yet. at age 77. She’s still going strong, speaking out, and lifting spirits.
Pops passed away in 2000, at age 86. I painted him in this painting (in gray tones), because he was ‘larger than life’ in that concert, in the songs, and in the heart of Mavis.
Painting is 20″ x 16″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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The first time we saw Pete Seeger, we were so close that to him that we were literally within spitting distance. He was giving a free concert at Penn’s Landing under the old fiberglass pavilion. I believe it was 1981. Bethann and I went there with our friends Frank and Colleen. We arrived just in time for the concert to start. The place was full. Everyone was seated on blankets spread out on the concrete floor of the pavilion leaving a ten foot space in front of the stage. Frank sees the space and says, “Look, they left room for us right up front!” and proceeds to the front, lays down the blanket and sets us up. We were front and center. Once Pete got going, we were, indeed, blessed with his saliva. It was a great experience, nonetheless. When tugboats came up the river they blew their horns to salute Mr. Seeger, as they knew he was giving a concert there that day. He was famous for his love of rivers and boats. He promoted environmentalism and spearheaded the clean-up and restoration of the Hudson River.
I was to hear Pete Seeger perform live on three more occasions in the 1980s, all of them demonstrations that I was taking part in, in Washington, DC. He was famous for his union organizing songs and work with the Weavers. There is too much to be said about such a full and long life for one little blog post. He lived over 94 years (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014). He published a magazine of sheet music of folk music and protest songs. He was a communist and blacklisted for it, during the McCarthy era. There is a petition to name the new Tappan Zee Bridge in New York after him. Read more about him here.
Painting is 18″ x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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Odetta Holmes was born December 31, 1930, in Birmingham, Alabama. She is one of those rare personages who went through life known by only her first name: Odetta. Martin Luther King, Jr. called her “the queen of American folk music!” She sang folk, blues and spirituals. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Mavis Staples all claimed her as a major formation influence for their music. She started performing publicly at age 13. Her last performance was October 25, 2008. She was invited to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration, but, sadly, she passed away of heart disease on December 2, 2008.
I painted her as part of my “Personal Heroes” series, because she never just sang for her supper. She sang for a higher purpose. She was always seeking to break new ground, to make progress. She has been called the “voice of the civil rights movement.” I’m sure that is hyperbole. Surely that title needs to be shared with the Staples, the Weavers, Paul Robeson and many others. But she was not just pushing for civil rights; she promoted human rights and economic justice. She considered herself to be “just one foot soldier in the army.” Nonetheless, President Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Medal of Honor. She performed all over the world, and received many honors. This did not change her message. This is an iconic pose for her. She has a determined look on her face and she is pointing upwards. Her whole life was dedicated to using the gifts she was given: her beautiful voice, sharp mind and determined spirit, to get us all to move onward and upward!
We had the great honor and joy to be able to hear her perform live at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 2001. (We had received complimentary tickets.) I was thrilled!
Painting is 12″ x 24″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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When one “Bings” Karl Marx, the first thing that comes up is: “Scientist – Karl Marx was a German-born scientist, philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.” One thing is for certain, a lot of misinformation has been circulated about him and what he taught, in capitalist countries. The first word in the description is the most important, however, and, in the end, science always wins, because it is reality. Science does not play favorites, does not discriminate on who your relatives were or how rich your parents were. Thermonuclear war will kill you just as dead whether you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth or in a mud hut. Global warming will flood you, starve you, burn you, impoverish, kill you, no matter how many billions of dollars you amass. Science is science. Facts are facts. Alt-nothing! It’s time to share! It’s simple justice! It’s human survival. It’s better for all of us. It’s more secure and happier for all of us.
Yes. Marx is a hero of mine. But, if he had not written what he had, someone else would have. It was inevitable. It is science. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He was a Marxist, also. That’s why the government killed him.
There is a new Socialist movement growing. Capitalism has failed fantastically. The masses, especially the disenfranchised, educated young people are rising up to claim their place and their fair share of the fruit of their forebears investment in infrastructure and technology for the common good.
The painting is acrylic on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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This painting is the latest in my “Heroes” series and my first with two people together. It is based on the famous photograph taken of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as they were preparing for their triumphal march into Havana in 1959 to take control of the central government after the corrupt Batista regime, along with their US carpet-baggers had fled. Castro managed to not only hold the country together, but transform it into the most stable, egalitarian, healthy country in the western hemisphere for over 50 years, despite over 600 American CIA assassination attempts, a draconian trade embargo, a failed, US led invasion. He eliminated childhood hunger, homelessness and rampant gambling. He instituted universal, free healthcare and free education through university. Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life expectancy than the US despite spending 1/5 as much on medicine. They send more doctors around the world to help developing nations and in crisis situations than the US does, though they are relatively tiny.
Fidel Castro said, “Capitalism is using its money. We socialists are throwing it away!” What he meant by that is that they weren’t using it to make more money. They were spending it on the people. All the profits from the factories and industries went to the people. There has been scarcity in Cuba, but no one has gone hungry. No one has gone uneducated. They have the highest literacy rate in the hemisphere at 99%. No one has gone without top-notch medical care. It is a medical tourism destination! The scarcity is because of the lack of trade because of the bullying of the US. In the US, when business is bad, the ones who work the hardest are the first to suffer! Not so in Cuba! Furthermore, Fidel wanted to have a free and open democracy. Honduras had tried that. They elected a socialist. Our CIA, under Dulles, went and overthrew him, and reinstalled fascism. So Che persuaded Fidel to maintain a benign dictatorship.
Fidel Castro was born on August 13, 1926 and died on November 25, 2016, proving once and for all that the best revenge is a long life.
Ernesto Che Guevara was born on June 14, 1928. (My birthday is June 14, 1955.) His early life is documented in the book and movie: “The Motorcycle Diaries”, about his travels from one end of South America to the other on a motorcycle. This trip was formative in his education as a revolutionary. He became a medical doctor first. In 1955, Fidel’s brother Raul introduced them, and he joined the revolution in Cuba. On June 2, 1959, he married Aleida March. He stayed in Cuba until 1965; then he joined the revolution in Kinshasa, Congo. In 1966, he joined the revolution in Bolivia. He was captured by the CIA on October 8, 1967, and summarily executed the next day. So much for human rights and due process and Geneva Convention.
These two are unlikely heroes of mine, since I am a pacifist. As Winston Churchill said, “Consistency is the bugbear of small minds!” The result of what they did cannot be questioned. They improved the lives of millions of people and literally made hundreds of thousands more lives happen. Vision, combined with action, blended with stubborn love for common people. Heroes indeed!
“If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.”
“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” – both by El Che
Painting is acrylic on 24″ x 18″ stretched canvas.
Price: $150 plus postage
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On February 9, 2014, I posted an article featuring Bob Marley on the website for The King’s Jubilee entitled One Love. That site is down now, since TKJ went out of existence a couple of years ago, after my health failed and the church abandoned me. It was written when I was still a believer of sorts. It still makes sense, if one just substitutes Love for God. After all, “God love is” according to the Bible. Bob Marley was one of my heroes, not because of his music, although I love that. It is because of his life of peace and simple generosity.
“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”
“The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?” – Bob Marley
Painting is acrylic on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.
Price: $150 plus postage
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Martin Luther King, Jr. was not just a civil rights leader working to elevate the estate of people of color in the US. He was a prophetic voice for human rights and dignity and economic equality. His image has been sanitized and his socialist rhetoric is ignored to co-opt his legacy to make him acceptable as a national hero. His birthday has been turned into a national day of servitude where students are compelled to pick up litter in parks or paint restrooms in poorly funded public schools. We must keep the young people busy lest they actually read his words or watch the three hours of extant newsreel footage of him, which would reveal the horrors he and his comrades endured just to be allowed to vote, or to stay at the same motels as their oppressors.
The federal government tolerated King as long as his focus remained on “colored folks issues.” He shifted his focus, however, once it became clear to him that poverty and the disparity between rich and poor were inextricably connected to racial hatred and discrimination. The CIA had him assassinated as he was in Memphis to support a union action, on April 4, 1968.
And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalist economy. – MLK
So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxury to the classes. – MLK
Painting is acrylic on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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Dorothy Day lived from November 8, 1897 to November 29, 1980. She lived with Lionel Moise, by whom she became pregnant. He persuaded her to get an abortion. She married Berkeley Tobey and was divorced a year later. She did give birth to a daughter, Tamar Teresa, by her common law husband, Forster Batterham, a biologist and anarchist, in 1926. They parted ways in 1929, after her conversion to Catholicism. She was a journalist and an activist for socialist causes and women’s suffrage. She was jailed on several occasions and engaged in a hunger strike after being arrested for demonstrating in front of the White House in 1917. She converted to Catholicism in 1927. This did not put a damper on her zeal to help the poor or to secure rights for the disenfranchised.
Dorothy established a Christian hospitality commune and started publishing the Catholic Worker in New York City. This started the Catholic Worker movement, which now has over 125 hospitality houses for the homeless and poor in the US and overseas. She advocated that every Christian household should maintain an extra room to provide hospitality to the poor. She is famous for saying: “When I feed the poor they call me a saint. when I ask why they are poor they call me a communist!” She also told people to not call her a saint. She understood, as I learned early on, that when people call you a ‘saint’ or ‘radical’, it is just a way of excusing themselves from taking similar actions to serve the poor.
Pope Francis included her in a short list of exemplary Americans, together with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton, in his address before the United States Congress.
“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”
“Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.”
“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 16″ stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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Sister Mary Elizabeth Hanssens was the only woman to ever take me out for a meal other than my wife. It was at a time when we were both working as volunteers in the Philadelphia prisons and jails, and we were both facing major problems that demanded resolution. She helped me over the hurdles to start the only tutoring program for the Women’s Detention Facility. I encouraged her to pursue leaving the convent in order to serve homeless and battered women.
She took a year of discernment away from the convent before being excused from her vows by the Pope. During that year, she resumed her education to become an attorney. She then bought a cheap row house in an at risk neighborhood, took in battered women, and joined the Habeas Corpus Task Force in the Philadelphia public defenders’ office. She helped countless poor and homeless people, especially women. Mary died at age 58, on November 4, 2010. She left behind her parents, siblings and two cats.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in southern France. Before and during the Nazi occupation of France, he led his city and the neighboring city and surrounding countryside to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler’s genocidal death camps. It started with the boarding school his church ran. He did not believe in discrimination, so the school accepted Jewish students, who wore the school uniforms and lived lives indistinguishable from the Christian students. It grew into families sheltering families. He trained them on how to blend in and how to respond to the authorities. They set up an underground railroad to help families escape from France to safety in non-Nazi occupied countries. No one in their network betrayed a refugee into Nazi captivity. His nephew’s class was raided, where he was teaching a few dozen Jewish children. The Nazis seized the children to take them to a camp. Trocmé’s nephew insisted on going with them, as their teacher. He died in the concentration camp. It is estimated that they saved over 3500 lives.
I read Pastor Trocmé’s story over 30 years ago. It was also made into a movie. As always, the book was better. He had correspondence with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and with Gandhi. He was a pacifist and had a strong ethical belief in honesty, charity and non-discrimination. He never made excuses for having to lie to the authorities. He felt that it was still sin, but to tell the truth would make him complicit in the deaths of fellow human beings, which would be a greater sin. He had been taught a hard lesson by his strict father, when he was a lad. He learned that it was not only right to do good; “it was essential to do the good on time!” It was his position that Hitler’s rule, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II was totally preventable, if only people of good conscience in Germany had done the good on time. Once Hitler and his cohorts were in power, it was too late to stop him without doing evil and causing death and destruction. This is an important lesson and one that America needs to heed today.
We have both major parties putting forward the most despised presidential candidates in our history. Both are bigots. One is a capricious fool; the other is a shrewd politician committed to endless war. One would incarcerate Muslims and Latinos here; the other would (and already has) kill Muslims, Latinos and others overseas. They have 30% acceptance rating between them from the electorate. Yet people are deciding their votes on fear of one or the other, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting both.
It is time to do the good on time.
This painting is my first monochromatic work. It is done entirely in shades of burnt umber to give it the look of a vintage photograph. This painting was used on posters and programs for a seminar on the life and work of Pastor Trocmé shortly after I finished it.
Painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus Postage
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Many years ago, I wrote an article in The King’s Jubilee newsletter about the Autobiography of Malcolm X, in which I recommended that every white man in America should read it. I got some feedback on that! Of course, the negative feedback was all from people who were too narrow-minded to read it. Several people said that “everyone should read it!” That missed my point. To overcome racism, it is important to gain understanding from other perspectives. Malcolm X became a hero of mine not because I agreed with everything he said or did, but because he had the courage to live a self-examined life in public. He was not so proud that he would not change his course when confronted with hard new truth.
“A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not in reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.” – Malcolm X
Painting is acrylic on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.
Price: $200 plus postage
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Mohandas K. Gandhi (Oct. 2, 1869 – Jan.30, 1948) became known as the Mahatma or the “Great Soul” due to his wisdom in leading the people of India in non-violent resistance against British colonial rule in the 1930s and 40s. Gandhi was a great teacher. He wrote many books to train the people for the inner discipline necessary for non-violent civil disobedience. He drew on the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. He was regarded as deeply spiritual, yet he professed faith in no deity or particular religion, saying: “My uniform experience has informed me that there is no other God than Truth.”
Many claim that his path of non-violent civil disobedience ultimately failed to liberate India, since they resorted to violent revolution. The truth of the matter, however, is that it is unlikely they would have had the cohesion and discipline to do that as a unified people had he not trained them in civil disobedience first. His teachings were instrumental in instructing MartinLuther King, Jr., Simone Weil, and Dietrich Bonhoffer, thus, he impacted US civil rights, and the French and German resistance.
It was through Gandhi’s correspondence with two different actors in the resistance to Hitler that I first connected with him; that was Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany and Simone Weil in France. This led me to read his biography and most of his works. I had to learn a fair amount of Hindi to understand them. I came to truly revere the man and fully embrace his philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience.
“I object to violence because, when it appears to do good, it is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”
Painting is acrylic on 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas.
Price: $200
This was a gift to my friend Ray Acker on the occasion of his ordination to the priesthood in the Antiochian Orthodox Church, as Fr. Herman. I wrote the words of Gandhi, above, on the back of the canvas frame:
“My uniform experience has informed me that there is no other God than Truth.”
She was born in Kovno, Russian Empire, now Kaunas, Lithuania, on June 27, 1869, and died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1970, having been exiled from the US. It was over thirty years ago when I read Emma Goldman’s memoir. She connected me to such a cast of great actors and thinkers in the world: Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, John Reed, Sasha Berkman, Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollock, Peter Kropotkin, and others. She was pivotal in my maturing to be a more compassionate person, and eventually a Socialist.
You can read her Wikipedia entry to get just a smidgen of the activities she was involved in and the lives she touched. She had been abused and misused by men all her life, starting with her father, yet she loved a few men and was loyal to a fault in her lifetime.
I set out to attempt to paint Emma smiling. I could not find a single extant photograph of her smiling, yet her most famous quote is when she said to V.I. Lenin: “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution!” This was when she arrived in Russia shortly after the Bolshevik revolution and wanted to celebrate, but Lenin told her, “Dancing is bourgeois!” I have been sitting across the room (about 11′ feet away) at eye level with Emma. She stares piercingly. She is both solid as a rock and on the verge of a flood of tears. This effect is quite accidental or subconscious on my part but it is quite haunting; and appropriate considering the abuse she had endured.
Painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage
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Dimitri Papagiani was born with a mysterious, incurable birth defect; more like, multiple birth defects. He is crippled. He cannot speak, except in unintelligible grunts. His body and limbs are twisted and he is confined to a horizontal wheelchair. His mother has cared for him for all of his 54 years, with help from his sister.
If you have followed my work on this website, you know that I have had 43 acquaintances who have committed suicide including 19 people close to me, who include my sister and my baptismal godfather. I also know many others who have attempted suicide, but failed. When I saw Dimitri at St. Andrew Orthodox Church, Lewes, Delaware, last Sunday, I was so moved. With so much stacked against him, he still decides to wake up every morning and face the day.
Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 16″ on stretched canvas
Price: $195 plus postage
SOLD.
Amber Evans was a youth worker, youth justice advocate, and activist in Columbus, Ohio. She was passionate about her work and touched many lives. Like so many of us who deal with the disenfranchised, the poor, the oppressed, the cast-offs of society, she had a hard time just coming home from work. She grew increasingly depressed and isolated from others. She disappeared on January 28, 2019. Many speculated about possible foul play from any of the authorities she could have offended in her many outspoken protests and petitions. It came out during the search for her that she had left her boyfriend a couple of days before she disappeared, after they had an argument when he urged her to get counseling.
Her body was recovered from the Scioto River on March 23, 2019, and identified the next day. It was then revealed that she had texted her family and boyfriend a cryptic message about leaving on the day she disappeared. They assumed this was her suicide note. She was 28. Some doubt has been cast on this, and further investigation is still ongoing. Her mother even helped produce a documentary movie presenting possible evidence of foul play. So we do not know if she took her own life or if she was martyred.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage.
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I have been painting two series of portraits, one of personal heroes, the other of people who have committed suicide. Someone asked me if it were possible for one person to be both. Unfortunately, it is. Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) is part of both series.
If you use the internet, especially if you use Reddit, Facebook or almost any news websites, you have benefited by using code and/or protocols written by Aaron Swartz. He was a world-renowned hacktivist, political organizer, computer programmer, entrepreneur and writer; all this in his teens and twenties. He was co-founder of Reddit. He authored RSS 1.0 for sharing news stories. He was instrumental in creating Creative Commons to facilitate sharing of copyrighted material on the web. He advocated for and facilitated a more open web. To that end, he also organized campaigns against bills that would make the internet costly and less egalitarian.
In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download articles using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. In January 2013, he was offered a plea bargain for six months in federal prison. He made a counter offer. Two days after that was rejected, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment He had hanged himself. He was 26. Later that year he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
“This is your life, this is your country – and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved.”
“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”
– Aaron Swartz
I painted this portrait in black on white to represent binary, which is what all computer code comes down to. It is larger than life at 24″ x 24″. The sides of the gallery wrapped canvas are red, so no framing is necessary. I painted the name and my signature on the edge, because I wanted to keep the portrait clean and simple.
It is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $320 plus postage.
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Stephen was from Nutley, NJ. He moved with his family into the house across the street from our family in Golden Valley, MN, when we were 11. He had no sense of style. He wore brown “dungarees” and slicked down hair, and fully buttoned-up shirts. Whoever heard of dungarees?! I had to whip him into shape before school started, so he didn’t get laughed out of there before he started. We got the grease out of his hair; got him into blue jeans and flared pants; taught him to unbutton his top button, and listen to better music. We spent a lot of time together. We explored ESP and telepathy and tales of the Windigo. We meditated together in the dark. We were convinced we had achieved telepathy. We played around with the OUIJA board, except we were serious.
In seventh and eighth grades, almost every teacher in our junior high who had a paddle, broke it over Stephen’s bony butt. He had attitude. Sometime in our eighth grade year, Stephen’s dad got transferred back to Nutley, so the family moved back. One Saturday, Stephen was playing soccer at a school. Being a hot dog, he kicked the ball on top of the school roof. He promptly climbed up onto the flat roof after it. He chased it until he fell through a skylight onto the floor of the school below. No one could find the key to the school or break in to get him before he bled to death from his injuries. His mother called our neighbor to let us all know. It was still winter in Minnesota.
I cried my eyes out. I went up to my room . I looked out the back window into the blackness of the night and I tried to have telepathy with Stephen. I thought we had been communicating over the previous weeks. This time, I got a message, but it was different. I immediately broke it off and never attempted telepathy again. I was convinced that it was a demon, and that it was probably demons who had been carrying the messages all along. Then, I started to sing the song I had learned as a 4-year-old when the Ericsons had taken me to their little Bible Church in North Minneapolis: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”. I soon started to weep, since I realized that Jesus was not my friend, since I was not his friend. That’s when I started to read my New Testament.
The story goes on to further spiritual quest and further confusion. My Lutheran pastor / confirmation instructor kicked me out of confirmation class for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, just one month shy of being confirmed. I eventually was ordained 3 more times in 4 more denominations. (I was ordained to the priesthood with my infant baptism.)
This painting is not of Stephen. I have no photos of Stephen. I do have his image firmly etched in my brain. I have started to sketch him to paint him several times. This time I decided to continue to paint who came to me instead. I don’t know who this beautiful boy is. I just went ahead and painted him, so I could tell you the story of Stephen, whose death I always considered a type of suicide. You see, Stephen was a misfit. He was not the smart one in his family. That was his little brother, Doug. He wasn’t the pretty one, or his mother’s helper. His dad kept getting transferred, so he was perpetually the new kid. His dad didn’t have time for him. So Stephen did outlandish, dangerous, risky things, to get attention and praise from strangers. It cost him his life at age 14.
Whoever this beautiful boy is or was, I hope he has or had a happier life.
The painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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When I first went on Facebook about 10 years ago, I did a search to see if there were other people named Cranford out there. I found Cranford Nix, Jr., and sent a friend request. It was accepted. I learned that he was a drug addicted rock musician, originally from Royal Oak, Michigan, who later lived in Blairsville, Georgia. What I did not learn until several months later was that he had been dead for about five years. He had “lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful memory” like the country song says.
Cranford Nix, Jr. was born on January 17, 1969, to Mama Dean Nix and Cranford Nix, Sr. His dad was the leader of a bluegrass band with two of his brothers and was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Cranford, Jr., suffered with mental illness and became addicted to the various drugs used to treat it. He mixed them with alcohol and heroin as well. He wrote songs about it. He had a gift of being lovable and conveying the joy of life to others. The irony was that he could not find a way to face life himself without self-medicating. A loving friend who maintains his music website put it this way:
This site is dedicated to the memory of Cranford Nix, Jr.. He was a really cool guy. He wrote and played great music. He made a lot of people smile.
How did Cranford die? – He died from drug and alcohol abuse. Please don’t do drugs, or try to emulate Cranford’s lifestyle. He struggled with addiction his whole adult life. His death wasn’t cool or glamorous. It was terribly sad and a tragic waste.
Cranford died on March 12, 2002, leaving behind a young widow and two sons. He was just 33. He had touched a lot of lives. So many people loved him. It wasn’t enough.
Cranford, Sr., passed away on October 14, 2012, and was buried next to Jr., whom he always called “Little Man”, in Blairsville, according to his instructions. So I remain, to my knowledge, the only known, living, first-named Cranford.
Painting is 24″ x 12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Michael was a classmate in high school. He was a year older than the rest of us, as he had been held back at some point. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed academically, but he was good at mechanics. His younger brother was a better scholar and was in the same graduating class as him. I’m afraid we did Mike a great disservice. There were a half-dozen guys who went to the same huge, fundamentalist, Baptist church in the city, who were intent on evangelizing our classmates. We met for prayer every morning before school in the library. Our church had youth recreational activities every Saturday and training activities most other evenings of the week. We invited Michael to these outings and talked to him about becoming “born again”. At some point, he made a profession of faith, got re-baptized and joined the church. I’m sure this caused a rift in his Irish Catholic family.
The pastors of this church (there were eight of them) would never bother to contact the parents of teenagers who were getting baptized and joining their church. I now find this reprehensible and totally irresponsible. My dad threw me out of the house for converting (literally), two months after I was re-baptized. If it were not for my mom insisting on leaving with me, forcing my dad’s hand, I would have been stranded, homeless, in rural Wisconsin. He decided to keep my mom even with me. So I don’t know what all Michael went through. Whatever it was, he went through it with no adult help.
We graduated together in 1973. We had good times that summer, with camp and lots of activities, bicycling together, etc. Then all of us went off to Bible college, that is, all of us except Michael. He lost his gang of comrades, his support group. It was sometime during that school year we got word that Michael had died. Then we learned it had been a suicide. We never got details, never knew about a funeral or burial. His family wanted nothing to do with us or the Baptist church. Since it was a suicide, he couldn’t be buried in the Catholic Church. We had been in college more than an hour away, taking 22 credit hours a semester, being self-absorbed 18-year-olds, too busy to notice that our friend was suffering.
I painted Michael in monochromatic, burnt umber with shiny golden hair. He had naturally wavy, blond hair. I chose to do this to signify the hope and promise of youth, “the golden-haired boy”, snuffed out.
This painting is monochromatic burnt umber on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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This painting is based on a 50+ year old black & white snapshot of my friend Dean and his new, German Shepherd puppy, Prince. We were about ten years old. Dean and his dad treated Prince in such a way that he became nervous and mean. Dean became more wild as he grew up. The only time I went egging houses, it was because Dean brought the eggs, when I was just planning on toilet-papering. I found out the day after, that eggs peeled off paint. We were thirteen. That was the last time I got together with Dean. We went to Carl Sandburg Junior High and were in the same graduating class of 1973 at Robbinsdale Senior High, but both schools were huge and our paths never crossed.
In January, 1974, Dean went to see The Exorcist, shortly after it was released, at a theater in downtown Minneapolis. He was high on LSD. He came out of the theater and blew his brains out with one of his dad’s handguns. His dad was a local sheriff. At least, this is the story as it was relayed to me by my mother.
The painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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I knew Fred since 1998, when he was 20 and I was 43. This was when he started working at Keeney Printing in Lansdale. I printed all of my icons and notecards there for my icon business for several years. I got on Fred’s nerves as I was a customer run amok. Marg Keeney had given me a key to the shop. I would come in after hours and use the copiers and the computers to make my prints. At times, I had to come in during the day to print as well. Fred was friendly enough, but he had an even darker sense of humor than I do. He loved heavy metal music and extreme graphics that to me appeared fantastical and gruesome. He was excellent at what he did, with attention to every detail. He was serious about what he did and was not afraid to put in long hours to get jobs done on time and done right.
Fred worked at Keeney for 13 years, until he was 33. He finally found a woman whom he loved. On 4th of July weekend in 2011 he intended for her to join him at his cabin in northern PA, where he was planning on asking her to marry him. However, she broke up with him. He took his own life at that cabin on July 4, 2011.
Fred’s death was devastating to his dear friend, boss and co-worker, Michael Keeney, as they were close comrades at and after work. Michael loved Fred like a brother.
I have lost 18 close friends and relations to suicide and a total of 43 acquaintances. My therapist asked me how I deal with all that grief. I replied, “Apparently not that well. That’s why I’m here.”
We have all heard people say that suicide is such a selfish act, because it hurts everyone who loves or even knows the victim. We have all heard that suicide is “the coward’s way out”; that it is braver to stay and fight to solve one’s problems. These sound like logical arguments against suicide to those who are left to grieve. But to the one suffering extreme depression and despair, they are bullshit. Through the depression and bipolar support group I attend I have met several people who have tried to commit suicide several times. It is not easy to carry out. It is not for the ‘coward’ or the feint of heart. If one does it wrong, one can end up living with permanent brain damage or some other lasting disability, along with the shame and regret that one did this to oneself. When a person is contemplating suicide, it is not to hurt other people; quite the opposite. It can come from a strong, false belief that the world, including one’s nearest and dearest would be better off without them.
So what is the best suicide prevention? This may sound trite or simplistic to you, but I believe it is love. But that love needs to be expressed by a willingness to just be with a person who suffers with a mood disorder. Logic, persuasion, expert advice don’t go near as far as just a willingness to take the risk to be a friend, knowing that may not be enough.
“Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.” – Paul of Tarsus
The painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $80 plus postage
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Pete was a friend of mine in Bible college. We went to a strict, fundamentalist school. Everyone majored in Bible. A strict moralistic rule book was enforced with anyone able to give anyone else demerits for so much as shaking hands with the opposite sex. He graduated in 1975. Later that year he ended his own young life, because he could not reconcile his fundamentalist, Baptist dogma and convictions with his homosexual desires.
This painting is monochromatic Black and White on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.
The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.
Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.
The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”
I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.
In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.
I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. This could have been me.
Painting is acrylic on 11″ x 14″ stretched canvas.
Price: $100 plus postage
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I decided to paint this moment in my sister Sue Ann’s life in the same style I originally captured it on film with my Instamatic camera just over 45 years ago. The painting is square, slightly out of focus, with a yellowed border as if it sat in a drawer all those years like the actual snapshot.
Sue Ann was copy editor for our high school yearbook, the Robin, for 1971, her senior year. I was the only sophomore on the annual staff. That was a violation of longstanding tradition. They were shorthanded for the Academics Section due to illness. I had submitted a number of poems for the book that demonstrated my talent. I started writing secretly, submitting articles through Sue Ann. A couple of months in, I was publicly accepted, when we had to start doing all-nighters to meet deadlines. Sue Ann was a tough editor. Articles had to be brief, yet packed with stories that would be understandable decades later. She and Janice Eisenhart, editor-in-chief, and Helen Olsen, our adviser, wanted a book that was to be a true time capsule; a reference students and others would be able to read years and decades later and get an accurate picture of the year at RHS. We all worked extremely hard to make that happen. This was before personal computers or word processors. We had to manually print on the layout grids each character of text, accounting for exact pica widths and justification. Then we would ship sections of the book off to the publisher at a time and wait to see how it looked. This painting is of my sister taking her first look at the finished book, the night before it was to be distributed at RHS.
The book won national awards. It received mixed reviews at school. That was OK. We expected that. It was not the usual, school spirit, jock centered, kitschy review of the year. There are no inside jokes or private messages. Forty-five years later, it reads well, and its style does not seem dated. This was a proud moment for Sue Ann, and no small accomplishment.
Sue Ann went on to Concordia College, Moorehead, MN, for a year, then continued at Augsburg in Minneapolis. She had taught me to write, and to be a ruthless self-editor. While at Augsburg, she lived at home. I ended up typing her English Lit. papers, in the wee hours of the morning. I became her editor. Her English prof. was my British Lit. teacher’s husband. They compared notes. One day, Mrs. Wood asked me if Sue Ann helped me with my papers. I told her No, but that I edited hers. However, Sue Ann had taught me how to write, so our styles were indistinguishable. She shared this with Prof. Wood, and reported back that they had a good chuckle over their Chardonnay.
This is in my suicide series of paintings. Sue Ann had started drinking regularly, as well as using various recreational drugs, while at Concordia. Both of our parents and three of our grandparents were alcoholic. Sue Ann got married, had three kids, was a paralegal, then an accountant. She decided to try to do an intervention on our dad to get him treatment for his alcoholism. That’s when she confronted her own. She went into treatment. She and her husband joined AA. She was after everyone to join AA. At some point, in her 40s, she became addicted to gambling. She ended up squandering the family’s resources, and had just separated from her husband and moved into an apartment on her own when she took her own life with a drug cocktail. She was about to be confronted by her boss for embezzling money from his companies. It was November 29, 2000. She was 47.
She had been a great mom. The great irony here is that she and I were the main, informal suicide hotline counselors when we were in junior and senior high.
Painting is 12″x12″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $150
SOLD [8/13/2017]
We knew Lynn nearly our whole time growing up, at least the part in school. She was in my sister, Sue Ann’s, class, so she was two years older than me. We were in Girl Scouts together, the musical, swim team, Student Service Organization in junior high, Annual Staff in senior high. She was one of the gang.
Lynn kept you on your toes. She always had a snappy answer. I have yet to meet another person as quick-witted or funny as she. She was smart. She developed early, so she was bigger and taller than all the girls and most of the boys all through junior high and most of senior high. This gave her body image issues. She so desperately wanted to be liked. Nothing worked out. She had academic success, but couldn’t find a man who could embrace her amazing intellect, her quick wit, while at the same time simply love her “like a boy loves a girl” as the song says.
We got word that Lynn had taken her own life, when we were in Minnesota visiting family in 1989. Lynn would have been about 36.
Painting is 11″x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas.
Price: $120 plus postage
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