Art

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.

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.

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.

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.

Main character in the beginning as he narrates the story you are about to hear.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Mohawks were the eastern most tribe of the Iroquois federation. This scene is in what today is called The Adirondacks.

Joseph Brant was a Mohawk missionary to his people, translated the Gospel of John into Mohawk, was lionized by the British when he went to England, was considered the Renaissance Man and fought for the British in the Revolutionary War.

The question is - which is which? It's a companion piece to the painting of the girl collecting water - called "Morning Water." One, autumnal, with the threat of death, the other, Spring and all the promises of life. Both of which I modeled for.

The girl surprised by the deer is a companion piece to "The Hunter and the Hunter" of a hunter looking at the tracks of the mountain lion unbeknownst to him is directly behind him. One, autumnal, with the threat of death, the other, Spring and all the promises of life. Both of which I modeled for.

The Iroquois lived in long houses that sometimes were as long as 200 feet long and were inhabited by clans. I actually discovered this village in the Finger Lakes region and I painted it exactly as is.

One the many islands in the Bahamas I was commissioned to paint by Robert Abplanalp who owned one that was a famous fishing resort called Walker’s Cay and another one for his own private residence.

South end of this British island just east of the landing strip (where people normally flew out of Fort Lauderdale).

Sunrise Beach on Walker’s Cay at the end of the day. An island about a mile and a half in length.

Alphonse, the go-to man of Walker’s Cay, standing on the highest point on the island.

Mohawk shaman. Non-combatants let their hair grow long. In this case I tried to make the connection between the inner and outer world the shaman lives in, in his attempt to connect with the “Orenda,” the Iroquois word for the “Wakan Tanka” (Great Spirit).

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.”

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.”

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!”

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: 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 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!”