The Artist's Statement Project; Part 2

This kind of Artist statement represents a collection of artworks, rather than just one. Seniors and Independent-Study Art students should do this if they are preparing a portfolio to submit to art colleges or university Art departments.

People who like an artist’s work generally want to know more about the artist. Artist statements are effective marketing tools. It helps make a connection between the artist and their audience. In putting your art into words you might also find that some of your ideas which didn’t entirely make sense to you become more concrete. Your writing might even open new paths in your thinking and take you in new artistic directions.

This definitely worked for me.

Artist’s Statement for a Body of Work

CIVICS; Faces in History

INTRODUCTION & OVERVIEW

When I began teaching 8th grade Civics in 2011, I wanted to decorate my classroom in a way that would be patriotic and engaging. I also wanted to reassure students that it was okay that an Art teacher was teaching a Social Studies class (I have a double-major in K-12 Art and 7-12 Social Studies). Over the last two decades of teaching, I’ve frequently drawn on presidents and other historic figures for drawings and paintings. I simply gathered them up and hung them up. That first year I even had students try to name as many of the people featured in the paintings on a worksheet for extra credit!

THEME & CONCEPT

Benjamin Franklin has an amazing line in the Broadway musical 1776. John Adams, fighting to keep a statement opposing slavery from being removed from a draft of the Declaration of Independence warns Franklin that if they don’t address issue of slavery from the onset, posterity will never forgive them. In an effort to get Adams to compromise with delegates from the South, Franklin tells him, “That's probably true, but we won't hear a thing, we'll be long gone. Besides, what would posterity think we were? Demi-gods? We're men, no more no less, trying to get a nation started against greater odds than a more generous God would have allowed.”

A basic premise of democracy is that leaders are servants of the people who elect them. The promise of America has always been that any kid could grow up to be President. What fascinates me about great men as a Civics teacher, as an artist, and as a citizen, is that they’re just men. Perhaps of great ability, power and experience, but never the less just men. Full of faults, imperfections, vulnerabilities and personalities. My hope is always to portray the faces of Presidents and protest leaders as human faces. Faces that could be your cousin or uncle or neighbor or friend. I hope whether its Truman or Gandhi or Lincoln, that viewers can see that there is a real person behind the face.

HIGHLIGHTS & PROMINENT PIECES

The Two Cowboys Two paintings which I tend to hang next to each other are an 8”x 8” oil on panel of Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and a 14”x18” gouache on canvas of Texas Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson. The paintings contrast each other not only in size and format but also in mood and style. Goldwater is more detailed and has more angles. He’s also more comfortable and confident. Whereas Johnson has more swooping curves and seems almost unfinished. Meanwhile his face seems more weary and jaded. These two paintings in many ways reflect many of the differences and tensions in our country.

BULLY! One of my all time favorite works is a 9”x12” tempera on matte board, monochromatic, orange,  impressionistic interpretation of Progressive/Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. This was painted quickly based on a photograph of the president laughing heartily. I think it captures the exuberant personality that Roosevelt was known for. Since we share a first name, I’ve always had a special affinity to him and with this painting.

KING This acrylic on paper in teals and black started a long relationship for me with Martin Luther King. I’ve always been an admirer of the activist and have tried several times over the years to paint him. Two or three oil pastel paintings haven’t made me as happy as this earlier work. A couple of years ago, I managed a larger, more detailed and developed piece which I gave as a wedding present to a friend who lives in Washington D.C. This early painting is more close-up, more intimate and probably better reveals the worry, sacrifice, deep intelligence and seriousness of his cause. Like the Teddy Roosevelt painting, this is one that has become an old friend. I think I’d like to have it hanging in whatever office, studio or classroom I occupy as long as I’m teaching, writing or painting.

STYLE & AESTHETICS

I never realized that I even had a style of my own until I hung several of my paintings together on the wall of my Art classroom this Fall. Looking at nineteen years of paintings I’d done with classes or as examples for classes, it finally manifest itself to me. It may may just be my own Attention Deficit Disorder, messiness or stubbornness- but my work seems to be very passionate, expressive and maybe just a little rough-hewn. I’d like to think that  I’m a shaggy lummox like a bison or a bear. Unkempt yet majestic. Simultaneously humble yet proud. Inglorious with dignity. In other words, quintessentially American.

INFLUENCES

Art History students and aficionados can probably recognize the influence of the neoexpressionism of the 1970’s and 80’s. I’m not sure if this is because that was the era in which I grew up or if its because of the strong German expressionist influence on my professors at Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska.

If I had to name my favorite painters, I’d probably rattle off names of pop artists like Wayne Thiebaud and Jasper Johns; the venerable regionalist Grant Wood, and Native American master John Nieto. But my work doesn’t really seem to look like any of theirs. Frankly I think my paintings remind me more of Jules Feiffer, Johnny Hart and Bill Mauldin. That’s probably because from ages 12-38 it was my dream to someday make it as a professional cartoonist.

Years ago a student told me that I teach History classes like their Art classes and my Art classes like they were Social Studies. So maybe I get my wired crossed a lot because I can definitely see how my cartoons are influenced by Grant Wood and Wayne Thiebaud and my paintings are more like Bill Mauldin or maybe even Charles Schultz or Matt Groening.

PROCESS TECHNIQUE & RATIONALE

Students who watch me painting often say something like “how do you DO that?!!”

Inevitably the teacher in me wants to either painstakingly explain to them the process of observing, analyzing, comparing and contrasting visual-spatial placement and proportions and then recording those observations and analysis. But I  know it would bore them to death.

That same teacher in me also wants to point out every single flaw in my painting, hypercritically explaining how their awe is misplaced because of how weak my technique is or how inaccurate the features are compared to the photograph I’m using. But I hate to devalue their experience, even if I don’t think I deserve whatever admiration they’ve just given me.

So I encourage them by offering that “you can do it too, you just have to keep practicing and listen to what I try to teach you,” yet not bother revealing all of my magician’s secrets.

Ultimately it is a sort of alchemy. Certainly there’s the trained artist’s way of perceiving and translating those perceptions into visual language, but there’s also a great deal of responding to and expressing about the subject matter. What they mean to me and how I feel about them. What I admire or disdain.

Too be sure, its not just about the artist and the subject. The painting itself makes its own decisions too, just like our children do. Or in this case maybe a better analogy would be to say that sometimes politicians break party-ranks and vote their own conscience (something I admire about Teddy Roosevelt).

Finally, you the viewer, bring your own experience to every painting too. Eighth graders who have no idea who Goldwater, Johnson or Roosevelt were often have vastly different reactions to my paintings than adults.

So there are four of us collaborating on each painting; artist, subject, painting, and viewer- each lobbying for our own interests. Hopefully we all make compromise and meet somewhere other than where our preconceptions would’ve taken us alone. That’s in the nature of democracy too, isn’t it? Together, whether in tension or harmony, we’re something very different than any of us would be left to our own devices. E Pluribus Unum, from many- one. Long may it be so.

The Power of Words

Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior wrote that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" in 1963.

Just last week Nigerian President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan said that "A terrorist attack on any of us is an attack on all of us."

I shared both quotes with my Civics class, but one eighth grader wrote on the board under Dr. King's words that  "no one gets this." I asked if they'd like me to discuss it with them and the same student said, "no, we don't care either."

That made me thing of Jimmy Buffett's famous line, "Is it ignorance, or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."

I care, God knows I care, but God only knows how I'm supposed to teach eighth graders how to care.

So I took King's words,

Injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to Justice EVERYWHERE

and I paired them with James Madison's words-

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

[Disunity] ANYWHERE is a threat to [Unity] EVERYWHERE

[Turmoil] ANYWHERE is a threat to [Tranquility] EVERYWHERE

[Insecurity] ANYWHERE is a threat to [Security] EVERYWHERE

Or would that have sounded better with [Offense] ANYWHERE is a threat to [Defense] EVERYWHERE?

[Suffering] ANYWHERE is a threat to [the General Welfare] EVERYWHERE!

Now THERE'S one that probably makes "rugged individualists" absolutely cringe, but AREN'T I my brother's keeper?

And of course,

[Tyranny] ANYWHERE is a threat to [Liberty] EVERYWHERE

So isn't it true?

Don't you CARE?

Don't you realize? Don't you know?

That "Injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to Justice EVERYWHERE!"

Is justice really blind?

Have you ever heard, "No Justice, No Peace!"?

Did you know, what Cornell West says?

He says that “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Merrium and Webster say that "public" means 

"exposed to general view : 

open, well-known, prominentc : 

perceptible, material..."

and 

"of, relating to, or affecting ALL the people."

Did you know?

Do you care?

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" 

Amos 5:24

De Facto Segregation

This is a day late for MLK Day, but it's pretty amazing if it's true and worth a thought. De Jure Segregation may have been banned, but de facto segregation continues.

U.S. fact of the day

from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

100+ people liked this

American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white.

Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino.

Ted Mallory has shared: If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today ...

Too True!
If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today ... Source: salon.com He'd be a member of the Tea Party?
Ted Mallory sent this using ShareThis.

Oil Pastel in Analogous Colors

Right makes might, not vice versa

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than eviltriumphant."
~ Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Don't be afraid to just knock

Last month, I started re-reading a book of sermons by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “Strength to Love,” from 1963. Many people would be surprised by what a Biblical teacher King was because we tend to take him for granted as a cultural icon or a Black leader or a political activist.

One chapter in particular struck me as something that we could all use these days. Let’s face it, this is a time of high anxiety and stress for many of us. Governor Culver recently tried to reassure Iowans that we’re in better shape than the nation as a whole to face the coming recession. But come on, things have been getting hard for all of us for a long time.

Wars, stagnant wages, increasing costs of living especially gas, food, heating fuel and health insurance, talk of climate change, cultural change, and global competition have all left us a little frazzled. Perhaps you’re finding that just the challenges of daily life, let alone personal tragedies and crises are wearing you down.

Rev. King talked about Jesus’ parable of the man who knocks on his neighbor’s door at midnight asking for bread found in Luke 11:5-8.

“The traveler asks for three loaves of bread,” Dr. King wrote. The three things we need most are faith, hope and love.

“In a generation of so many colossal disappointments, men have lost faith in God, faith in man, and faith in the future…in the midst of staggering disillusionment, many cry for the bread of faith.”

“There is also a deep longing for the bread of hope.” Dr. King continued, “In the early years of this century many people did not hunger for this bread. The days of the first telephones, automobiles, and airplanes gave them a radiant optimism. They worshiped at the shrine of inevitable progress. They believed that every new scientific achievement lifted man to higher levels of perfection.”

But as we all know, came WWI and WWII and the Cold War. We realized that technology won’t produce a futuristic utopia. We may have more than enough food to eradicate world hunger, but greed and corruption prevent us from ever being able to get the food to who needs it. The twentieth century left mankind wounded and disillusioned.

King lamented that “the light of hope went out, and they roamed wearily in the dark chambers of pessimism. Many concluded that life has no meaning… But even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.”

If anything, we’ve learned too well that life is not fair. Some people don’t even see the point in trying anymore.

Finally, MLK pointed out what we are most starved for.

“There is the deep longing,” King wrote, “for the bread of love. Everybody wishes to love and to be loved. He who feels that he is not loved feels that he does not count. Much has happened in the modern world to make men feel that they do not belong. Living in a world which has become oppressively impersonal, many of us have come to feel that we are little more than numbers.”

We all need to find ways to get out of bed in the middle of the night and come to our neighbor’s aid. We all need to try to feed others in anyway we can but we should also remember where to turn when times get worst.

Luke 11: 5-8 has a man asking to borrow bread from a neighbor, but in Luke 11:1-4, Jesus teaches the disciples the Lord’s Prayer and in 11:9-13, He urges us to pray and ask God’s help for anything we need. If we need faith, hope, or love, all we have to do as ask, seek, or knock.

MLK Day, Monday January 21, 2008

Rev. Michael King Sr. grew up a poor, Black sharecropper in Georgia at the turn of the last century. As a young man he moved to Atlanta, fell in love with a Baptist preacher’s daughter and eventually followed in his father-in-law’s footsteps and studied to become a minister.

In 1934, Rev. Michael King, Sr., attended the World Baptist Alliance in Berlin. He was so moved by the teachings and sacrifice of sixteenth-century German church reformer Martin Luther, that he changed his name from Michael King to Michael Luther King and finally Martin Luther King. His teen aged son chose to change his name to Martin Luther King Jr, after his father.

MLK Grew up in segregated Georgia during the Great Depression, but went on to become one of the greatest leaders of the civil rights movement. Now, on the third Monday in January, Americans observe the legacy of his contributions with a national holiday.

King Jr. studied sociology in college and then went to seminary to become a pastor like his father and grandfather. While serving in Alabama, Pastor King became involved with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group of mostly Black pastors committed to achieving racial equality through non-violence.

Many people either think of Martin Luther King Jr. as just a Black hero, with nothing to offer to the rest of us. Others take him for granted as just another pop-cultural icon along with JFK, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. For me, he is a hero of the faith. A courageous Christian leader like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who stood up to Adolf Hitler and the NAZIs.

One of my favorite books that I wish everyone on Earth would read is Dr. King’s “Strength to Love,” (1963) in which he explores the parable of the good Samaritan and what it means to love your neighbor and love your enemies, as Jesus taught. In it, he also wrote about the parables of the friend who knocked on his neighbor’s door at midnight and the rich fool who hoarded his wealth in his barns, only to have his soul required of him that night. King addresses fear and speculated on what sort of epistle the Apostle Paul might have written to America.

I think that even in mostly white, rural Iowa, it would be good to consider some of the lessons of Dr. King today in 2008. We forget that he was a Baptist minister like Mike Huckabee and a PhD who could analyze domestic and foreign and military policies just like like a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton. We forget that King was a Nobel Peace Prize winner like Al Gore.

I recently found a speech that he made about Vietnam back in 1967 on April 4, 1967 at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City. He was assassinated a year later on April 4, 1968 trying to help striking garbagemen in Memphis, Tennessee.

People wondered why a civil rights leader was suddenly turning into a war protester.

“I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’…but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?”

After three decades of supply-side economics, Americans have seen the high-tech bubble burst, and the real estate bubble burst, the stock market repeatedly crash and rebound, more millionaires than ever before yet a disappearing middle class, disappearing manufacturing jobs, jobs shipped over seas, high gas prices yet record profits for oil companies and a widening gap between the super rich and the working poor. No wonder so many voters in Iowa responded to the messages of John Edwards as he railed on big corporations and unfeeling insurance companies.
King talked about our problem with consumerism in his 1967 speech too.

“…We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”

Black , White, Red, Yellow, or Brown, Dr. King’s teaching may have as much to say to us today, as it did forty years ago.

MLK in a speech on Vietnam in 1967

Guys, I was reading this speech that MLK made on Vietnam back in 1967. He always amazes me. People take him for granted as some kind of pop-cultural icon, but he was SO smart and SUCH a man of God. We forget that he was a Baptist minister like Mike Huckabee and a PhD who could analyze domestic and foreign and military policies like Barack Obama, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner like Al Gore. If you have the time or the inclination, read or listen to the whole speech at:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Here are a couple of excerpts. Try this- read this first one and think about the run up to the Iraq war back in 2003-04. And replace when you read either the first one or the last one, replace Vietnam with Iraq and replace communism with Islam. Remember Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

MLK Day

Did you know why MLK was in Memphis for the garbage workers' strike when he was shot on his motel balcony? Two black garbage men sought shelter from a storm during a break. The city wouldn't let them inside with white workers, so they sat in the tailgate of their truck. They were crushed to death by the compactor. During the protests and labor strike that followed, workers wore placards that read "I am a man." As in, a human being- not a piece of garbage.

Today fundamentalist white Southern Baptist "conservative-Christians" dominate American politics, and unfortunately, American theology. Their issues are anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-Darwin, pro-war and pro-rich. Their end-times theology of "millennialism" is perhaps their greatest false doctrine which has a dangerous influence on all the rest of their teaching, but worst, on American foreign policy. I will stipulate that abortion is wrong and that the Bible clearly does not condone homosexuality- but should Christians only protect a human being before it is born? Don't we also have a responsibility to be our brothers' keepers their whole lives?

Dr. King is most remembered for his leadership in the non-violent civil rights movement, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner was also an opponent of war and a champion of social and economic justice. Today, on his birthday, please pray that God will lead our nation and it's leaders away from coruption and complacency and toward His will for us to have a heart for the poor, the weak, and the infirm. Pray that "compassionate conservatism" would become reality, and not mere campaign rhetoric.

"...any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the economic conditions that damn the soul, the social conditions that corrupt men, and the city governments that cripple them, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood."

~Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

James 2 (New International Version)

Faith and Deeds

¹⁴What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? ¹⁵Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

¹⁸But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

¹⁹You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.

²⁰You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless?

Please visit http://www.sojo.net/- Soujourners: Christians for Justice and Peace

Martin Luther King Junior, oil on canvas board, 2003
This was a wedding gift to the same friend who got the saxophone above. He and his wife have a passion for multiculturalism and equality. As a history major I've always been a huge admirer myself.

MLK's prayer

Prayer:

Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of
segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial
injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Now is the time to make justice a reality to all of God's
children.
Dear Lord, let the dream of little children one day living in
a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by their character come true.
Lord Jesus, let freedom ring, let it ring from every
tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, help us to speed up that day when all of Your children,
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of
the old spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last."

In Jesus name,
Amen

Only love

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
~Martin Luther King Jr.

"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."~ Dr.Rev.Martin Luther King Jr.

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