Hope

Soulèvement du Prolétariat

Posted by Cranford

On Tuesday morning, I had a vivid dream that I remembered when I woke up. In my dream I was in a town on a slope much like Manayunk. Someone told me to go to the Catholic Church. I walked a couple of blocks to an old, Romanesque church. When I entered, it was more like a warehouse, no pews, no altar, no windows. There were tables and shelves full of books on the left side of the building. The right side was empty. There were several customers in old, worn clothes, browsing and rooting through the piles and a few shelves of books. An older, portly priest was in charge. Every book I picked up had only drawings in it. I finally chose a hardcover, cloth bound book with this drawing of a worker’s face on the front. It had no words in it. Only action filled, angular drawings filled the tall pages.  The priest saw that I was interested. He told me I could take it for as long as I wanted it; just return it when I was done.

Soulèvement du Prolétariat

So, yesterday, I painted the cover from memory on canvas. In my dream I could see the grain of the fabric. It was off-white and had defects and was smudged. To replicate this, I varnished part of a drop cloth canvas, painted the parts that were brown, titled it in French with my name as the author, then varnished it again. It is of minor importance what language the title is, since there are no words in the book. It is titled Soulèvement du Prolétariat: un roman graphique or Proletariat Uprising: a graphic novel in English.

I pasted it on the wall with clay based paste. It remains water soluble forever. This way I can remove it with warm water without damaging it or the wall. (In case it sells) It is part of my Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2019 project.

Now I just have to draw or paint the story for the pages and get it published.

The painting is acrylic on 15″ x 25.5″ canvas.

Price: $100 reduced to $25 plus postage.

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #21 Black Lives Matter

Posted by Cranford
Hope #21 Black Lives Matter

The 21st image of hope is that of an incarcerated police officer. Police officers in the US have been murdering Black men and at the rate of 2 per day since the end of the Civil War without any consequences. They have been killing Native Americans at almost the same rate, with impunity. It is “Shoot first. Ask questions never.” Police even execute Black men who are handcuffed in the back of police cars, in front of their children, who have done nothing wrong, and face no consequences. The Bible is full of warnings of judgment against a society who does not punish the wrongdoer, or who does not avenge those who oppress those of low degree. America claims to be a land of freedom and rights. This is NOT what people of color see, which is the majority of the world. It is not what anyone who knows the facts see, either.

I painted the bars red, as if dripping with the blood of the innocents. It would be horrible to see a violent backlash against police and a complete breakdown of the social order. But that is what the police and the courts are bringing us to, if they do not execute just judgment. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

For those who concocted “Blue Lives Matter” I have this to say: it is pure racism! There is no such thing as a blue life! People choose to be police officers. Multiple incidents have borne the lie of that. There was an off-duty Black police officer who was approached by officers. He was carrying in an open carry state. He had a permit. He was doing nothing illegal, were he White or Black. An officer opened fire on him. Another officer recognized him and told the other one to stop. He refused to stop, because he was Black! So all blue lives matter for is preferential treatment, if they happen to also be White.

It needs to end!

This is #21 in my images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #20 Children

Posted by Cranford
Hope #20 Children

The fact that we keep desiring to have children and keep having children is probably the greatest sign of the level of hope most humans have in the future. Against all indications to the contrary, we still feel things are going to get better for our children.

This is #20 in my images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $15 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #19 Solar Power

Posted by Cranford
Hope #19 Solar Power

The 19th of my 31 images of hope is Solar Power. It isn’t complicated. There is the sun. There is a wind generator. (It is not a windmill, since it is not grinding grain into flour.) There is a solar collector. This could represent either or both a photo-voltaic collector and/or a heat collector. Then there is a hydro-electric generating dam. These are all solar. It is the sun that causes the winds to blow and that evaporates the water for clouds to carry it inland to rain and feed the rivers, etc. Solar power is not alternative power. It is just power. Fossil fuels all started out as solar power. Plants and animals of bygone aeons lived on what the sun provided. Their remains got buried and digested in the earth in such a way as to yield concentrated, portable, ancient, solar energy. The thing is, this was likely a once in the life-cycle of the planet event. At least, it’s not going to happen again in the life-cycle of our so-called civilization.

For the last couple hundred years, we have been burning fossil fuels as if they were income, when they are really capital. What is even more foolish, is that governments, particularly the US government, have  been subsidizing their consumption. Today (2018), if the US were to subsidize solar energy at an equal level that it does petroleum (to say nothing about the wars for it), it would be 20% cheaper. The price would only come down as usage increased. I don’t get why so-called capitalists, and so-called conservatives are so profligate that they do not conserve their capital. They burn it, while creating great deficits to do so. All the while refusing to lay the groundwork for us to live on our income, the sun. We should have been using this great find of fossil fuels to build solar collectors of various sorts to fuel the world’s technology cleanly. That was Edison’s vision. All these capitalists see is the next quarterly report for what they are doing now. So they rape the earth and pollute our water for one more drop of oil. What is the Middle East doing? They are building total, solar cities. Why? They know that the oil is about gone.

Our only hope to not literally drown ourselves and our children is to abandon fossil fuels now and commit totally to solar power like Pres. Jimmy Carter wanted to, 40 years ago. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #18 Liberal Education

Posted by Cranford
Hope #18 Liberal Education

The 18th image of hope in the Fun-A-Day series represents a liberal education. Liberal does not represent a political position. It is the classical meaning of liberating, as in “liberal arts”. As a society, we have trashed these and turned universities into trade schools and turned students into cogs and “human capital”, i.e., wage slaves, in the capitalist system. Corporations fund research in universities to no benefit of students. Students still end up in debt for life, with no recourse, even through bankruptcy. Today, students graduate from Ivy League schools without being able to construct or even properly read a complex English sentence. They pay their money. They get their job tickets. Trump graduated from University of Pennsylvania.

A liberal education doesn’t so much teach someone what to think or give them facts, but teaches them how to think; what questions to ask; how to research to find facts and truth.

Yet there are talented and intelligent people who are not given opportunities because they could not afford to go to college. Appropriate higher education should be available and free to everyone who qualifies for it, if we truly believe in equality, and want to advance as a people, and want to solve humanity’s problems. Degrees should not be job tickets, nor is education limited to institutions. Lincoln never graduated college. He read the law. Pres. Carter was home schooled. He is a nuclear physicist.

The bookshelf is not full. That indicates that those who read, study and learn, will have their own books to write, to add to the “great conversation”, as Mortimer Adler called it. This is our hope for our children and our grandchildren. It has been stifled by the tuition financing system and the wicked bankers and their fascist partners in Congress, in both falsely so-called major parties. They need to go if hope is to survive.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $75 plus postage.

SOLD!

Hope #17 Clean Air

Posted by Cranford
Hope #17 Clean Air

“Nothing but blue skies from now on!”, the song says. The first Earth Week really shook up President Richard Nixon. I was 14. I headed it up in my junior high. We actually made the evening news on our local, CBS affiliate for one of our actions. 70 of us, without any adult supervision, rode our bicycles with environmental slogans on signs on them, from Carl Sandberg Jr. High in Golden Valley to Hennepin Ave, in downtown Minneapolis with trash bags and collected litter and trash all up and down Hennepin and placed the mountain of trash in bags at the base of the flags on Nicollet Mall. Then we biked home. Now, if we were the only one, and that was all we did, it would have been cute. But it wouldn’t have impacted federal policy. But that was just the last of several actions we did that week. Hundreds of us had abandoned the buses and walked or bicycled several miles each way to school that week. We participated in a teach-in, etc. This was student organized. Thousands of schools and colleges and universities had environmental fairs and demonstrations. Nearly all regular classes across the country on almost all levels of education were replaced on Wednesday of that week with Earth Day Teach-Ins that happened in the fresh air when at all possible. This all happened before the internet, before cellphones, without paid TV commercials or magazine ads. It scared the living daylights out of Richard Milhouse Nixon. He knew the only possible way he could get re-elected was if he would address environmental issues. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. The impact of that act and the ensuing regulations on the improvement on urban air quality, reduction of lung cancer, emphysema, asthma and a number of other ailments is amazing.

Yet, there are those who would go back to the bad old days and deregulate. They think it is too expensive to have low emissions and clean air. Here is a photo of Los Angeles before and after the EPA.

Let’s hope for blue skies from now on.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #16 Bridges Rather Than Walls

Posted by Cranford
Hope #16 Bridges Rather Than Walls

This is a simple painting of a bridge across a stream. We can take bridges for granted in a country as developed as the US, until they start to fall apart. A few years ago, a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis / St. Paul, which I had crossed countless times as a child and young adult, collapsed in the middle of rush hour. We use bridges here in Bucks Co., PA that are hundreds of years old. A couple of years ago several of them were closed for repairs. It was an inconvenience and messed up traffic. All of a sudden people who were 2 minutes down the road were now 45 minutes apart, what, with all the detours. My point is that bridges bring people together.

Walls have the opposite effect. The Great Wall and the Berlin Wall were both grand failures. International borders are soft walls even without the physical walls. They create artificial barriers that divide people and limit freedom. Their use to limit the movement of people by use of passports, visas, etc., is an invention of modern nation states. To build a wall to make that control absolute is totalitarianism. To do so in a nation whose infrastructure is crumbling such as ours is, is not just ironic, it is criminal!

Mexicans have been emigrating from the US at a rate higher than the rate they have been immigrating to the US for, at least, the last 12 years. If the wall gets built, it will be to keep Americans in.

Painting is acrylic on 8″ x 8″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #15 Racial Equality

Posted by Cranford
Hope #15 Racial Equality

When I was a child there was a “Flesh” Crayon in my box of 64 colors. It was for an obviously pale complected person like me. Some time in the 1970s, Binney & Smith replaced the wrapper on that Crayon with “Peach”. It was the same color, only the times had changed. By the mid 1980s, I saw a box of 16 Crayons, which were all different shades. All 16 were labeled “Flesh”. The times, they had changed! By the time Obama was elected in 2008, some White folks presumed to declare that we had become “post-racial”, proving just how out of touch they were with the Black, Hispanic, and Native American experience in this country. American police murder an average of two Black men and 1 to 2 Native Americans every day without consequence. They have been doing this every day for over 150 years. Then there are the incarceration rates, the jobless rates. The infant mortality rates, and on and on.

Then Trump appoints Nazis and KKK and openly supports them from the White House! It looks bad now. But, believe me, he is an old man and not healthy. His party and the Democrats are not healthy. A new day is coming.

We dare to hope! We want the whole box of Crayons! People are people!

Bigots can go to hell, sooner rather than later, please!

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #14 LGBTQ

Posted by Cranford
Hope #14 LGBTQ

I never said hope isn’t controversial. One person’s hopes and aspirations can seem threatening to another’s view of the world or their economic grip on things. When slaves hope for freedom, their masters’ standard of living and leisure is threatened. When the Lesbian Gay Bi Transgender and Queer become visible and vocal, religious authoritarians and others who are afraid of losing their positions of authority if gender lines get blurred or gender oppression were to end get riled up. This is to hope that bullying will stop, human rights will be respected; civil rights will be extended; and we will learn to live at peace and with respect for one another.

The painting is actually the middle square set at a 45° angle.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #13 Biodiversity

Posted by Cranford
Hope #13 Biodiversity

We hope to stop global warming and preserve biodiversity. This is a painting of a Butterfly Fish on a coral reef. Butterfly Fish are about the same size as sunfish or rock bass, 5 to 6 inches long. They have a 7 to 10  year lifespan and mate for life. There are a wild variety of colors and patterns of Butterfly Fish, but their numbers in the wild are decreasing. They are endangered, due to global warming and pollution killing the coral reefs which provide their food and protection.

What is truly sick is that there are many wealthy, older capitalists who don’t care about the future of the planet. I have actually heard them speaking about this. All they care about is that their stock portfolios do well enough to take care of them until they die. There was even a so-called Christian Secretary of the Interior Watts, under Reagan, who said that we did not have to preserve our natural resources in our parklands, because “Jesus was coming back soon.” I signed a record-setting petition for his removal. Reagan finally listened. Trump’s team is worse and he is deaf.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #12 Peace

Posted by Cranford
Hope #12 Peace

Twelfth in my 31 images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018 is this dove of Peace.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #11 Time’s Up!

Posted by Cranford
Hope #11 Time's Up!

This is a simple painting of a digital stopwatch. Instead of numbers, the read out says: “Time’s Up!” This represents the movement and the hope for the end of patriarchy and with it, the end of sexually abusive and predatory practices. Many worked and are working toward this end for years, including many women in the socialist and anarchist movements, such as Ana Pauker, Emma Goldman, and the women and men of Philly Socialists and similar organizations. Recently, it has gotten mainstream press in the New York Times and at the Golden Globes. Hopefully this is not just this year’s fad, but is a real sea change that will mean the end of patriarchy. Hopefully, it will end abuse, and not just replace it with a different form of abuse. We have seen pendulum swings and witch hunts before. We need healing and a new era. We can only hope.

Painting is acrylic on 4″ x 4″ x 1-3/4″ stretched canvas.

Price: $35 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #10 Garden

Posted by Cranford
Hope #10 Garden

It was sometime in the second half of the 1980s. I was Mennonite Chaplain for Philadelphia Prisons. Duncan Mbogo Wangigi, the head of Regions Beyond Christian Mission was visiting our church. He had some free time. I was assigned to “entertain” him. I had the task of picking up an ex-offender from Phila. House of Corrections to take him to Liberty House, the aftercare house I helped set up in Schwenksville, PA. Duncan headed up the largest African based, Christian mission agency. He was in the US to continue his theological education. I thought this was a colossal mistake. He had finished his course work, so was doing some fundraising work for his mission agency. We drove from Montgomery County down to Center City to pick up Angel from City Hall. He wanted to get his final “Spanish” haircut before he went to the suburbs, so we went to his barber. Then we went to his mom’s house. She treated us to a fine feast. I digress.

Duncan was in shock. He had been touring all over the US and had never seen such sights. He had been in the worst parts of Africa, yet he had never been in such fear as he was with me in that car in Philadelphia. He asked if I had taken him to a different country. I told him that he knew his geography better than that. There were oceans between us and other countries or hours of land travel. He said that even in the poorest parts on Africa, people had a place to grow some vegetables or some grain. Here there was nothing! He said this was this was the worst poverty he had seen. He told me that he was going to tell all the people he would speak to after that, that they were neglecting their own Jerusalem, while helping the regions beyond.

So Hope #10 is to have a garden, to have some measure of food independence.

Painting is acrylic on 8″ x 8″ stretched canvas.

Price: $30 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #9 Marijuana

Posted by Cranford
Hope #9 Marijuana

The Founding Fathers had great hopes for hemp as an export crop for the fledgling republic, and for a subsistence crop for homesteaders. Jefferson and Washington both grew it and smoked it. They promoted it for a primary crop for the new nation. because of its many uses for rope, structural beams, smoking, tea. It is even reported that they smoked some after signing the Declaration of Independence.

It has been shown to repair the damage done by strokes. It can stop migraines, some of which (mine) cause strokes. It is not physically addictive. It does not cause cancer. In fact, it has some curative properties. Smoking it has actually been shown to have a positive effect on the brain of stroke victims, actually repairing damaged areas and restoring lost function. It is a non-addictive, non-damaging painkiller to provide relief for people with chronic pain and degenerative diseases.

Not just the legalization of marijuana, but the affordable availability of marijuana without prejudice is a hope for millions of suffering people. It is also a much healthier high than alcohol, so wouldn’t damage families with alcoholism.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $40 reduced to $15 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #8 Welcome

Posted by Cranford
Hope #8 Welcome

The eighth image of hope in my Fun-A-Day series is “Welcome”. We have just come through the “holidays”. For so many, it can be the most difficult time of the year. It is hard to go home to the family or there is no family or no home.

Painting is acrylic on 12″ x 12″ stretched canvas.

Price: $30 reduced to $10 plus postage.

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #7 Guns? / Peace?

Posted by Cranford
Hope #7 Guns? / Peace?

The US spends a huge portion of its gross domestic product on its military. Its #1 export is arms. We are the number one arms dealer in the world, including the prime seller to terrorists like Yemen, ISIS, Al Qaeda and Saudi. Of course, the US is the largest terrorist nation in the world with a military budget larger than the next ten nations combined, routine torture, preëmptive war, a congress which openly discusses terrorist tactics such as mining a civilian harbor resulting in the sinking of an ally’s ship.

We hope in guns to the point that it is impoverishing us. We say we cannot afford universal healthcare, yet we spend more than what that would cost,  every year, on weapons systems that the Pentagon doesn’t even want. Three of them don’t even work! Al Qaeda was created by the CIA. ISIS was created by Congress. Sen. John McCain helped promote it! There are photos of him with the founders, and he is giving his support. It is all about selling our weapons, to keep the rich arms dealers wealthy. It has nothing to do with peace or security. So if you put your hope in guns, you will be put to shame. There are revolutionists who admire these weapons and find them attractive, because electoral politics have proven to be hopeless. Both, so-called major parties are in bed with Wall St., Big Pharma, and the military industrial complex.

So this image is a hope against hope; that we would learn to disarm, demilitarize, re-prioritize, and spend our resources to support life, instead of spending our lives supporting arms.

I positioned the AK47 and AR15 in the form of a Cross and painted them red, white and blue. Most Americans are deluded, thinking that the US was founded as a Christian country and fights for democracy and human rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. The country was founded on religious bigotry, opportunism and genocide. It has been at war continually since its founding; many times with multiple countries.

Painting is acrylic on 10″ x 10″ stretched canvas.

Price: $30 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #6 Clean Water

Posted by Cranford
Hope #6 Clean Water

Much of the world’s population doesn’t have reliable or consistent access to clean, drinking water. So the sixth in my 31 images of hope is simply an open tap flowing with clean, potable water.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #5 Spring Crocus

Posted by Cranford
Hope #5 Spring Crocus

While we are experiencing sub-zero wind chills, it seems only natural to hope for an early Spring. Crocuses, whether purple, lavender, white or yellow, don’t care whether the snow has gone or not. If the days are long enough, the calendar is right, they are popping up and blooming.

Painting is acrylic on 10″ x 10″ stretched canvas.

Price: $50

SOLD

Hope #4 Food Bank

Posted by Cranford
Hope #4 Food Bank

This is my fourth painting in my 31 images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018. My wife and I have been through the wringer over the last several years. I had a series of health crises, starting in 2010. They were all related. It all started with an infection in a scratch on the back of my neck that I apparently picked up from an overly enthusiastic Thank You hug from one of the homeless men I served on the streets of Philadelphia. I have an inherited autoimmune disorder. As a result, I am allergic to multiple antibiotics and random other drugs. To make a very long story short, I ended up with a heart valve replacement, losing my business and ministry and our home. I am on disability. While I was going through that, the bank Bethann worked for for over ten years started systematically firing all of its middle-aged women. They planted a missing $100 in her drawer, sent her home, fired her; found the missing $100 after she left (exactly where they put it).

At any rate, Bethann has a job now. She was laid off from one and then found another. She has a couple of weeks off without pay for cataract surgery. I have disability. we have rent and utilities. Her work does not cover medical insurance yet. Our credit cards are tapped. We make too much to qualify for SNAP (food stamps). We can’t afford groceries or Christmas gifts or much of anything. Our local food bank, Perkasie Fish, lets us shop weekly. They have gluten-free for me. They have almond milk for kids who are lactose intolerant. They are helpful, generous and kind. they have a free thrift store we can shop at once a month. At Christmas, parents could shop for their children. What blew our minds was that we could shop for our grandchildren who were 12 and under. We expected to pick up one gift each. No. I went through and got to choose several things for each in different categories, plus bonus items for them and for us! This is hope.

I do have some concerns, having had other experiences with food banks and serving the poor. I have been to food banks where the staff fill your box for you and you have to take what they give you, and that’s it! In a neighboring town, in fact, the food bank is very institutional and demeaning. For decades of serving in prisons and on the streets, I have seen people who are doing what on the surface looks like the same activity, but when I got a little closer, I could feel the condescension. True service to the poor is not actually so much “to”. It is among and of. We are the same. We are in this together. It seems to me, the people at Perkasie Fish get this.

My other concern, goes to the fact that we are served so well, because we live in a wealthier, whiter town, than our sisters and brothers in Philadelphia, Camden, Bristol, Pottstown and Chester. There is that nasty platitude that has no basis in morality and is definitely not Christian: “Charity begins at home.” The problem with it is that people who spout it, use it to justify never expressing charity to anyone who is not like them. It takes effort, or taxation, to have us share wealth equitably to help all of our neighbors. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrated that the neighbor was not the person who was close or convenient, but the person who was in need. The traveler who helped went out of his way to return to help.

Donate to two food banks if you can afford to. Donate cash to one in your town and one in an underserved area. Give a little hope to some families who could use it.

Painting is acrylic on 10″ x 10″ stretched canvas.

Price: $50 reduced to $25 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

Hope #3 Sunrise

Posted by Cranford
Hope #3 Sunrise

The third painting in my Fun-A-Day 31 images of hope series is a sunrise. The psalmist says, “His mercies are new every morning.” This expresses the hope that with each new day comes a new opportunity to get things right, or at least a bit better than the day before.

Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 16″ stretched canvas.

Price: $120 plus postage. SOLD.

Hope #2 Rock Pine

Posted by Cranford
Hope #2 Rock Pine

This is the second in my series of paintings portraying aspects of hope. This is a pine seedling that has emerged from a crack in a rock. I find this hopeful and encouraging. It demonstrates the persistence of life in the world. There are actually some pine cones of certain species of pine that will not open to release their spores unless and until they are exposed to the extreme heat of a forest fire. The seeds or spore are so tiny and resilient that they can find purchase in the tiniest cracks. After a flood has washed away all topsoil down to the bedrock, these trees can seed themselves and start to break up the rock and drop needles and provide habitat for birds and other animals, etc.

Painting is acrylic on 8″ x 8″ stretched canvas.

Price: $35

SOLD

Hope #1 Golden Valley

Posted by Cranford
Hope #1 Golden Valley

I have set a challenge for myself this month to paint a picture of hope every day of January for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018. When I did an internet search for images of hope, most just had the word in it. A few had a tender plant sprouting up. One had a tree sprout coming up from a crack in the pavement. That was on my list to do, already. There were candles and there were scripture verses and other pithy sayings. There were fewer than 30 unique ideas in the images. Almost all of them contained words. I started this painting with a blank, cadmium yellow 20″ x 20″ x 1-1/2″ canvas.

Bright yellow is the color Buddhists use to signify hope, blessing, happiness, or good luck. Christian iconography also uses it to signify blessing or glory, which is the “blessed hope”. I looked at it, pondered it, and let it tell me how to turn a blank, yellow square into an image that conveyed hope. The result was wheat, loaded with grain. I grew up in Golden Valley, Minnesota, the home of General Mills. It had been a crossroads for a mill since 1875, with the rest being golden wheat fields until about 1960 when the rest was carved out of the prairie to house us baby boomers and our WW2 veteran parents. The next suburbs out were Crystal and New Hope. Everyone listened to the farm reports with the futures prices, weather, etc., and the off-color, farmer jokes on the major CBS affiliate AM radio station that went coast to coast overnight. Even though half of the state’s population lived in the “Cities” (Mpls/St. Paul), everyone knew that agriculture was where their bread was buttered, literally and figuratively. Just as in millennia past, even though our Golden Valley was no longer waving with grain, but had golf courses and Kentucky Bluegrass, our hope was still in the golden fruit of the grass growing on the prairie to the west.

Painting is acrylic on 20″ x 20″ x 1-1/2″ stretched canvas.

Price: $120 reduced to $60 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

SPOON!

Posted by Cranford
SPOON!

Comrades Skittles and Oreo are ordering us to take our positive affection opposition to fascism up another notch with this one. First, there was “CUDDLE!” Then it was “SNUGGLE!” Now it’s: “SPOON!”

Couldn’t you just see it; a couple hundred thousand couples spooning on the mall in DC, gently asking for no more imperialist wars, an end to subsidies to petroleum, full conversion to solar power, conversion to cradle-to-cradle production cycles eliminating landfills, … ? Cats can dream, can’t they?

Painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on stretched canvas.

Price: $200 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

SNUGGLE!

Posted by Cranford

Phase Two of the Revolution: SNUGGLE!

SNUGGLE!

Cuddling was phase one. I realize we need to work on that. Some may be asking what the difference is between cuddling and snuggling. C’mon, comrades! Are we serious about making progress and spreading love and joy? Well, then, the difference should be obvious. Snuggling involves more motion. It can be done in larger groups. Think mosh pits, only embracing. Now put that on the road to Mar-a-Lago to block one of the so-called president’s golf vacations he said he was never going to take. The international press would have fun with that, so would all of us snugglers.

“Make New Friends, Not New Refugees!”

This just came out from my fellow Minneapolitan. It expresses the sentiment of the movement:

The original is for sale now, but within a week, hopefully, I will have posters, postcards and lawn signs.

Painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on stretched canvas.

Price: $200 plus postage

Fill out the form below so we can arrange payment and delivery. I take PayPal, so all credit or debit cards are accepted.

CUDDLE!

Posted by Cranford
CUDDLE!

I have been searching for ways to use my art to positively respond to the current horror that we face in American governmental breakdown. Each day, there is a new attack; a new round of newspeak. One day it is a congresswoman proudly proclaiming that her vote giving permission to internet service providers to sell all of our browsing histories to whomever wants to buy them “protects your privacy.” The next day, Sean Spicer is giving a grimacing Park Service employee a huge, game-show, donation check for $78,000 (supposedly Trump’s 3 months’ net salary), two days after Trump’s budget cut the Park Service budget by over $1.5 billion. Fact checkers have determined that 69.1% of Trump’s statements are false. One White House reporter said in frustration, “It is hard to know what to think when you can’t tell what Trump means when he uses words.”

Yesterday, I started to paint this portrait of my cat, with a Che Guevara beret. Skittles helps keep me sane. He climbs up onto my left side and cuddles. If things get too intense, he lies on my keyboard. We have matching heart murmurs. He will get in my face and command me to “CUDDLE!” It struck me that this is what America and much of the world needs right now. I can see it now, massive cuddle-ins in front of defense contractors and fracking stations; cuddlers blocking access to United Airlines offices; cuddlers circling the Pentagon; cuddlers on the mall in DC asking for an end to military expansion and for universal healthcare.

“Make Love, not Human Services Cuts!”

HUG O’ WAR

I will not play at tug o’ war.
I’d rather play at hug o’ war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles.
And everyone wins.
– Shel Silverstein

Painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on stretched canvas.

Price: $300 plus postage

SOLD