Song of the South II

I agreed to do a painting on/about the year 1963. Due to the fact that I wasn’t even a twinkle in the 60s, I had to look up some facts. 1963 seems to me to be very dark. It is turbulent and violent, a molten crucible of ideals that would cool to form our society today.  Civil rights looms large, with the death of four children in a church bombing in Birmingham, followed by the march on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, one of the highest moral moments in American oratory. The end of the year brought the Kennedy assassination, leaving a nation and a people psychologically torn asunder.  At the same time, Betty Friedan published Feminine Mystique, further extending civil rights, and giving birth to the slow social restructuring that comes with modern feminism.  Song of the South II draws from the tensions and violence manifested in private spaces as families and workplaces change.  The character of Uncle Remus’s tar rabbit is at the end of an era, filled with beauty and violence and uncertainty.

featherhead

ink, chalk, spraypaint and collage on found print, 24h x 18, 2000-2013

This is a painting I finished up a couple of nights ago. My old corporate painting job left me with a lot of raw materials to modify- this was an intaglio print of flowers I pulled from the scrap paper bin. At some point in the past ten years I spraypainted a background and then stuck it back into a folder.  A little drawing, cutting, and pasting, and here we go.  For some reason it reminds me a little of Magritte. Ceci n’est pas une featherhead.

Ice Cream

Collage, Pen and Ink, Chinese Watercolor and masking tape, 11×17, 2012