Art

Monday Morning 9:00 AM
Monday Morning 9:00 AM is the title of this iconic Main Street America of the late 70’s that introduces the second section of the first trilogy, The Mendicant. The story in this section takes place in five days from Monday morning to late Friday evening. The significance of Monday morning 9:00 AM is everyone has to face their figurative Monday morning and often it’s the attitude that they go into it that will determine whether they will prevail or merely survive.

Rosebud
The title is Rosebud. The image is a recurring theme throughout all three novels of the trilogy. Rosebud is the name of one of the iconic Lakota Indian reservations in South Dakota, the tribe the major character lived with in his youth. But it’s also the dying words of Citizen Kane which we learn in the end of the movie refers to the sled he was playing with before his world of innocence came to an end - or his Eden - much like the Indian’s lost Eden that now can only be recaptured through alcohol (which has decimated the Indian culture since the very beginning) - thus the Coors Beer cup (plastic at that) in the foreground juxtaposed with the traditional Indian furnishings. Even the background outside is a combination of the old and the new: teepees and a pickup truck.

Railroad Crossing
The title is Railroad Crossing. Another iconic image of Middle America in late 70’s - the edge of every town that led to that vast emptiness of the rolling prairies that promised more than the towns they bordered, a theme our narrator explores both in his narrative and his paintings.

The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe
The title is The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. The lure of the open road, 1965, where the narrator, is hitchhiking across the country and gets a ride from a girl in a 50s Ford convertible, standard fare for a child of the 60s.

No Title Narrator
The painting has no title. It’s the lead picture of the first section of the first novel of the trilogy, The Mendicant, called Portrait of an American Wiseguy. He’s telling us about the last few weeks where he had just run away from home. Whether he’s rolling a joint or examining the pencil he often uses to draw his take on what just transpired is ambiguous. All we know is he’s high on something, getting higher by the minute about the last few weeks where he was probably even higher and by the second chapter he explodes with a diatribe that takes the reader on a roller coaster ride that only accelerates.

No Title Wiseguy
This painting has no title either - it’s just the central image of Portrait of an American Wiseguy. Whether he really looks that way or wishes he did is never certain since all the paintings in the trilogy are all his, painted at some point, and since they cover his paintings throughout the years, we never know for sure since his narrative and paintings stand in sharp contrast to each other - more like counterpoint.

No Title Girl in Car
No title - it was painted for the first novel of the trilogy - it’s the girl he hitches a ride from. At the moment he’s driving so she can take a break. Later on in life he paints her at least a dozen different times in various roles.

Smiling Girl
Our narrator, who we realize by all the reviews on the opening page, will become a successful painter, but in meantime in the first section, Portrait of an American Wiseguy, he’s a cautionary tale of wasted youth and any pictures at this stage are purely in his imagination. It’s not until the second novel of the trilogy that we see the results: in her case, more than a dozen different paintings in a myriad of different roles.

An Inverted Christina’s World
Although the lady in the painting is not a character in any of the novels, she looms large as a type representing a part of America our narrator thinks he has missed, mainly in “The Great Flyover” - the heartland, middle America’s logical extension of the American Dream - the reverse of Wyeth’s moribund Christina’s World where instead of dying grass, it’s nascent, instead of a girl who is reduced to crawling, she’s almost too large for the picture, the first of a whole series of paintings that are a paean to “the girl of our high school dreams, Peggy Sue or Bobby Jean the high school Prom Queen who’d grow old gracefully and every line and wrinkle could only endear her to you all the more.”

Standing Woman
I made reference to her before in a post, comparing her to Gaston’s Standing Woman, that paean to woman being another example of a perhaps unconscious, but subliminal desire on our narrator’s part: all of which he thinks is a way of life he somehow missed, out there in Middle America, that is perhaps best represented in his favorite painting, Main Street America 9:00 AM.

Narrator Fantasy 07
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 01
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 02
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 03
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 04
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 05
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Fantasy 06
Since the narrator’s favorite fantasy was to be an Indian when anything west of the Hudson was the America Fitzgerald so eloquently waxed poetically on at the end of The Great Gatsby, it was just a matter of time before he included his favorite model into his fantasy.

Narrator Island Fantasy 04
Before our narrator, a New Yorker by birth, looked across the Hudson longingly at “The Golden West” he would someday paint, there were the islands where the Rousseauian Dream of the new Eden all started long before Gatsby’s “old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailor’s eyes” - but the very first ones that started it all.

Narrator Island Fantasy 01
Before our narrator, a New Yorker by birth, looked across the Hudson longingly at “The Golden West” he would someday paint, there were the islands where the Rousseauian Dream of the new Eden all started long before Gatsby’s “old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailor’s eyes” - but the very first ones that started it all.

Narrator Island Fantasy 02
Before our narrator, a New Yorker by birth, looked across the Hudson longingly at “The Golden West” he would someday paint, there were the islands where the Rousseauian Dream of the new Eden all started long before Gatsby’s “old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailor’s eyes” - but the very first ones that started it all.

Narrator Island Fantasy 03
Before our narrator, a New Yorker by birth, looked across the Hudson longingly at “The Golden West” he would someday paint, there were the islands where the Rousseauian Dream of the new Eden all started long before Gatsby’s “old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailor’s eyes” - but the very first ones that started it all.

Voltaire vs Rousseau
Voltaire versus Rousseau? The contradiction comes in the narrator’s narrative versus his paintings. While painting on the one hand the “Noble Savage” of Rousseau, his narrative on the other hand is thematically more like Voltaire’s Candide so that by the third novel of the trilogy - The Missionary - he all but abandons his painting for a more ascetic , Mother Teresa like existence living in the desert with the “lepers” of society - the mentally handicapped where he now wrestles with not only whether he should paint, but even more importantly what.

The Narrator’s New Vision
The narrator’s new vision: “The desert and the parched land will be glad… the wilderness will rejoice and blossom… Like the crocus, it will burst into blossom. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”

Will Sampson
Although not stated but implied, the narrator’s success by the second novel of the trilogy has reached celebrity status painting movie stars and Presidents but at a cost where he now feels “CHAINED TO THIS EASEL NIGHT AND DAY” in order to support a lifestyle for his ex-wife and three kids so they can live in a place that’s over “5,000 square feet and a dozen different rooms while old Dad’s living in one room – one. very. small. room.”

Nearest Town
In the third novel of the trilogy called The Missionary, our narrator lives way out in the desert miles from the nearest town. To further his isolation, the mission he lives and works on way out in the desert “seems to be where most outcasts end up anyway… and the church being right between the two… the “res” and the local “leper“ colony – not only makes it uniquely their church – the Indians and the people whom I live with – but most of all assures no one else’ll ever come!”

High Country
Although our narrator lives in the desert where by noonday in the summer it’s over a hundred and ten - within an hour, he can be in the high country where the summers are cool and the hot siroccos from the desert are a world away - a land the Hopi and the Navajo consider sacred - where legends are born and history is made and at its highest point is over two and a half miles high where you can see almost half the state of Arizona…

Fort Apache
Fort Apache: we think of John Ford and John Wayne in a black-and-white movie – not the white picket fence of some sleepy little New England town. Which is why our narrator painted it. But it’s the officer’s quarters on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation which he painted because it reminded him of the home he left a long time ago when he was a wild and rebellious young man who left to see the world - the very world he is now painting all the while thinking of the world he left a long, long time ago.

The Contenders
The title of the painting is The Contenders. It’s a sociological study of the pecking order. For example, who are the contenders? The obvious two are the two in the center; however, if you were to study the expression and posture of each one, one might see another story. The obvious leader is the one in the center, sitting, while the others center around him. By their position in the group and expression you can pretty much guess with whom they align, ranging from the one on the far right who could be that follower of the more aggressive one of the contenders to the one on the far left, sitting, who appears more detached. My favorite is the one sitting on the far right, in the peanut gallery, who obviously isn’t buying any of it. But of course, given the chance, every last one of them would go for it, but in the meantime they play it safe and convince themselves they don’t care.
Now the real challenge for the artist, both the one in the story and me, was to create fourteen distinctly different individuals when the only model I could find willing to shave their heads leaving a scalp lock (since no self respecting Indian in the late 70s would consider parting with their long locks that had taken them years to grow), was me, the artist. So after posing for hundreds of photos and changing each one of my final creations to cover my tracks, presented this painting and dozens of others, all studies of the New York State Indians, in a gallery made specially for the occasion. And who walks in on the opening day when everyone of importance has shown up? My mom. To which she says “The cloning of Jimmy Mueller!”