It is cliche’ to say that John Prine (October 10, 1946 – April 7, 2020) was an “American treasure”. I regard him as a treasure to humanity. He would reject all of these special accolades and just say he was trying to do his best to be human. That’s what made him so wonderful. We have lost him, along with a myriad of other, wonderful and talented people, to COVID-19, so far, in 2020. His last song was “I Remember Everything.” It was recorded from quarantine.
John Prine was a champion for social justice, equality, and tolerance. He managed to do this with a sense of humour; never letting any bitterness or resentment show. He survived throat cancer and had to learn how to sing (an octave lower) all over again, and kept on going!
When I heard the song above on WXPN, the other morning, I sat in the driveway and wept for the loss we had experienced as a people, a nation, and a world. Rest in power, John Prine!
The painting is black and white acrylic on 24′ X 24′” gallery wrapped canvas. The edges are painted red, so no framing is needed. I signed and dated it on the bottom edge, so as to not interfere with the portrait.
This is a painting of a ruffled pink daylily from our yard on Front St., Souderton. It is painted in black and white on a 24″ x 24″ gallery wrapped canvas. The edges are painted charcoal gray. The title, date and signature are on the edge, giving the flower a stark, uncluttered look.
Price: $200 plus postage.
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Their mom had her phone out ready to take a picture. They came in close, hollering and laughing. Our granddaughters were 8 and 7 when the picture that this painting is based on was taken.
Painting is black and white acrylic on 24″ x 24″ gallery stretched canvas. The edge is painted black, so no frame is required.
Price: $200 plus postage
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Mike is a good friend. He has helped our family countless times. He has taken me to the Emergency Room more than once. We have many times regretted our decision to buy the house on Front St., Sonderton, from a financial standpoint. But, on balance, we feel the move enriched our lives for having met Mike.
I will write more later.
This painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ gallery stretched canvas.
Price: $150 plus postage
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The Bald Eagle (haliaeetus leucocephalus) built the largest tree nest of any animal in the world, at 2,200 pounds (1 tonne). It uses the same nest year after year high up in trees (up to 180′) or on cliffs, near lakes, streams or reservoirs. It feeds mainly on fish, swooping down and snatching them out of the water. It also raids other birds nests to steal food, such as Osprey and some smaller birds. It will eat mammals and small birds and quite often carrion.
The word bald in this bird’s name is and archaic use, meaning “white headed” not hairless, or, in this case, featherless. The genus and species names are Greek and translates as: “sea eagle” “white-headed”.
The Bald Eagle was almost eradicated from the United States in the first two thirds of the 20th century by a combination of hunting with guns (mostly for the prized tail feathers) and the cumulative effect of DDT weakening the shells of their eggs making them so soft that they would be crushed in the nest during incubation, just as Rachel Carson had predicted. Populations have since recovered and the species was removed from the U.S. government’s list of endangered species on July 12, 1995 and transferred to the list of threatened species. It was removed from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in the Lower 48 States on June 28, 2007.
It’s amazing to see this huge raptor fly overhead. It is sad to see one lying dead on Route 309 after being hit while it was eating roadkill.
Every one of us is the result of the coming together of a man and woman. Men and women attract one another. It’s as simple as the Madison Avenue maxim: “Sex sells!” There are shapes, movements, scents and sounds that all go into making someone of the opposite sex more or less attractive or desirable. The survival of the species relies on this attraction. Humans are complicated, however. There is the problem of male dominance ranging from wage disparity to the rape culture, which is on full display in the White House in the Trump confusion. (One cannot in honesty call it an administration.)
So two simple white lines on a hot red background with all the right bulges could lead the mind to thoughts of desire. Or the lines could be seen as battle lines in the war of the sexes.
Painting is acrylic on 17-7/8″ on 23-7/8″ stretched canvas Price: $100reduced to $50 plus postage
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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.
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: $100reduced to $25 plus postage.
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This painting actually has four carousel animals on it. There are three seals. Notice the babies’ faces peeking out under the saddle. There is an ostrich coming up behind (or to the left), as well. I decided not to include the mostly obscured tiger , elephant and pony in the painting. This is the smallest diameter carousel I have seen, I painted it using only burnt umber and titanium white. This style is called monochromatic.
I painted Clyde using just black and white paint based on a photo shared on Facebook by our friend Deb Vriesen of their dog just after she buried him. It was so cold in Minnesota, they had to wait several weeks, with his body frozen in a shed, until it was warm enough for them to build a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig a grave.
I never met Clyde in person and only saw one photo, so I hope I caught something of his personality. If it doesn’t look much like Clyde, I think he looks like a friendly dog at any rate.
The painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $150 plus postage.
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This is a monochromatic painting of me and my wife, Bethann. It was done in the spirit of the old Instamatic, black & white snapshots of the ’60s. In that spirit, neither one of us is very happy with the outcome. It should probably have sticky black corners put on it and be inserted in a large photo album, to be viewed at our funerals. It does look better in person.
The 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.”
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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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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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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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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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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