Redtree Times

Dedicated Follower of Fashion (1996)

Fashion is made to become unfashionable. I design my clothes always for tomorrow. Already I would throw out nearly everything in this collection.

–Coco Chanel, Life magazine (August 1957)

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

–Oscar Wilde, The Philosophy of Dress, The New-York Tribune, 1885

This post came about in a weird way this morning. Or, at least, I think it will come about. It’s still taking shape in my head.

I began with no idea as to what to write this morning, thinking it might be a good day to take a break. I’ve posted something every morning for something like 75 days now which is a little unusual, even for me. It might be some sort of response to my treatment, a psychological recognition that our time here is limited, making me want to blurt out what I have to say now because there may not be many tomorrows.

We won’t get into that now.

Getting back to this post, I knew that even though I had no ideas, I was going to play Eli’s Coming, the Laura Nyro song that was a big radio hit for Three Dog Night in 1969. The reason for this was that one of the vocalists for the band, Chuck Negron, died Monday at the age of 83.

Watching the video below from 1969 reminded me of the fashion of that time and into the 70’s, particularly the striped bell bottoms worn by Danny Hutton. I never had striped bell bottoms at the time but it did remind me of a pair of bell bottoms that I did own.

I bought them at Harold’s Army Navy store in downtown Elmira. Harold’s was the cool place to buys jeans at the time, with a widely known reputation. When the Grand Prix teams hit Watkins Glen every year many headed to Harold’s to buy the Levis that were hard to obtain in Europe at that time. Not long after this time, Tommy Hilfiger made his first foray into the world of fashion, opening his People’s Place store a few blocks away from Harold’s.

I would go into Harold’s after school during my Junior High days, looking for bargains. One day, I found what I thought at the moment might be the greatest pants ever. They were maroon bell bottoms and the price was great, too low to pass up. They would certainly look cool on me as I walked down the hallways of Ernie Davis Junior High.

And maybe they did. All I can remember is that they were the stupidest pants I ever came across. They had no zipper. They had a button fly, which is okay in itself. However, this pair of pants had two sets of button flies, one running up the top of each thigh, forming a big square flap at the front. It was a pain in the butt fiddling with the eight buttons to simply get the damn things on, and going to the bathroom took on a greater urgency. Every trip to the toilet was an ordeal.

But being a dumb kid, this didn’t keep me from wearing these awful pants. I lived with its drawbacks and discomfort all for the sake of feeling cool. It wasn’t my first or last experience with trying to stay fashionable back then. These days, I make no effort at all to wear what the cool kids wear. I am as unfashionable as they come.

I often equate this with my work. It has been fashionable at several points in my career, the flavor of the month. It seems like everything I put out flies off the walls. And that is great. Who doesn’t enjoy that? But I realized years ago that that kind of reaction is ephemeral. I’ve seen it with my work and with the dozens of other artists who replaced me as the then flavor of the month. Many, if not most, are not even with those galleries where they once shined brightly for a short time. Most are still trying to satisfy the appetites of others.

I realized that I couldn’t remain the flavor of the month all the time. Trying to do so meant that I would forever be trying to satisfy the ever-changing appetite of a fickle public. That is an impossible task. It also goes against whatever idea of artistic integrity I maintain. I wouldn’t try to change my work to please others.

I would cook for myself, first and foremost. If others like the flavor, they are welcome at my table.

It might not be the fashion of the moment, the flavor of the month. But that would be okay with me. I would just do what I do and do it as well as I can with a consistent level of quality. I saw my work as being like a good pair of jeans. Sturdy, comfortable, and fitting into most any situation. Dependable and never thrown into the trash heap of fashion.

Wasn’t planning on writing about this when I set out from the house this morning. But there you go. You never know what the day will bring you.

Here’s Eli’s Coming. The late Chuck Negron is to the far left.

Better hide your heart…

The Bargaining–Now at West End Gallery

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

–Mark Twain, letter to William Dean Howells, April 2, 1899

 I could see this new small painting as representing someone pleading to the heavens for either the salvation of the human race or its damnation. perhaps it’s Mark Twain after reading his morning paper. I know that I suffer that same feeling when reading of how we mistreat one another on a constant basis.

It’s hard to not come away wishing that the Fat Lady would finally sing and bring this whole damn human opera to an end.

Yet there is always a part inside that recognizes that we also possess a huge capacity for goodness and love.

This love-hate relationship that many of us have with our species is a good example of those contradictions I mentioned here yesterday. From moment to moment, we move from begging for forgiveness for our species’ transgressions to pleading that the whole group be obliterated and returned to dust and ash.

With little to offer and not really knowing what we need, we bargain sometimes for the best and the worst.

And unfortunately for us, our bargain for either is sometimes accepted.

The results never match our hopes or expectations. It might be best for us if our pleadings go unfulfilled, much like Twain wrote: I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

I can see this in this piece called The Bargaining. It is included in the annual Little Gems show opening next Friday, February 6 at the West End Gallery. It has a feeling of someone bargaining to both heal and injure. To live or die.

Whatever it takes to keep us from despairing.

Hmm. This went in a much different way than I had expected. But that’s okay. I can live with that. That seems like a pretty good deal I’ve bargained for this morning.

Here’s a song that you may struggle to see how it connects with the rest of this post. It’s a recent performance by Moby and Jacob Lusk of a 1995 song from Moby, When It”s Cold I’d Like to Die. It’s a powerful and stark performance. Like the image of tree without its foliage in the winter.

Maybe I chose this song because I walked to the studio this morning in -2° temps. There is a solemnity and silence in this kind of cold that makes you ponder the coldness of nonexistence. This song presents one of those human contradictions, feeling the pull of both death and life. Many of us have felt an emptiness within us at times brought on by the coldness and dangers of this world. At such times, we feel hopeless and powerless, too tired to keep going. But though we might think that death would end our suffering, we know that the only way out is to keep moving, to find the hope contained in despair.

Maybe that’s the connection of this song here. I don’t really know.  But it is a beautiful song in my opinion.

And that is good enough for me on this frigid morning.

Easter Egg (1996) — At West End Gallery

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

—Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Thoughts about Art  (1873)

On Friday I delivered a group of small paintings to the West End Gallery for their 32nd annual Little Gems show. Most of the work is new but there also some of my earliest pieces, a couple that I have featured here in recent weeks, Summerfield and Isolation both from 1994.

My opinions of these older pieces have all evolved and changed since I first painted them. I don’t believe any of the five were ever shown in a gallery and at the time I simply just didn’t think they were good enough. ‘

But it’s been a long time, over thirty years now, and I have changed as have my opinions and perspectives on many things, including these paintings. The quote above from an essay on the qualities it takes to be a good art critic written by the 19th century British artist, author, and art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton stresses just that point. He advises would-be art critics to accept inconsistency and changes of opinions about many things. He says that a writer or art critic (or an artist) must constantly be reviewing what they have done in the past and be willing to change their opinion of it based on the new knowledge and experience they have gained in the time that has passed since it was first done.

Hamerton states that consistency of opinion is the mark of a stupid person. They form an opinion and refuse to change despite all evidence to the contrary coming to light after that opinion has been formed. The intelligent person on the other hand has a more flexible mind, one that can honestly accept that their prior opinions or statements can evolve and change. In the words of Uncle Walt from Song of Myself: Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.) 

The painting at the top is a perfect example of a change of heart on my part. It was painted it in February of 1996. I had been showing my work at the West End Gallery and within a few weeks would be starting a long relationship with the Kada Gallery in Erie. I was starting to really find my groove as a painter and was at a point where I had some control of the media.

On this particular little piece, I had an idea of how I believed the colors of the sky would merge and blend. It was something I had done many times before over the past year and I had certain expectations. What emerged after I dropped the colors together was completely different than what I had anticipated. It was mélange of pastel colors., pink and yellow and robin’s egg blue. An Easter egg. Not even close to what I wanted or expected which was bold deep colors.

I was not happy with what I was seeing. In fact, I was a little angry. I had high hopes up to that point for the piece. I thought the foreground that made u the bottom quarter of the piece was truly exceptional with strong colors and forms with a real organic feel that pleased me greatly. It deserved a bold strong sky. Instead, it was like an Easter egg with puffy pastel colors that somehow weakened the feel and tone of the piece in my mind then. It just was not the piece I wanted to see. I felt somehow deceived by it.

I decided to just put it aside and move on to the next piece. It never left a crate of old work until now.

It is titled Easter Egg now. That was not its original title that I noted on the bottom of the piece. When first done, in my frustration and anger, I wrote It’s Easter!– So Kiss My Ass. This little painting will always live happily in my mind with that title.

Over the past thirty years, I pull it out at least a few times a year and look at it. It always makes me smile. The anger faded a long time ago, replaced by a growing appreciation. What I initially liked in it was still there and I began to see the sky and its colors much more favorably.

Yes, it was not what I wanted to see all those years ago. It was something different and I needed the time to put aside my disappointment in order to see its true qualities. I have found that when someone or something is not what we want it to be, we fail to see and appreciate what it truly is.

I see this now for what it is. And I like it very much.

It is a great example of an evolving opinion, one of those little contradictions we all hold inside us. I believe that both Hamerton and Whitman would concur. Uncle Walt might even chuckle at the original title.

Here’s a song about things changing. It’s a cover/interpretation of the Bob Dylan song, Things Have Changed, from soul/blues legend Bettye LaVette. She released an album of Dylan covers with the same title as this song in 2018 that received a Grammy nomination. Good stuff.

Exiles: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , 1995

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

—The Masque of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

I was planning on writing about something other than the current situation in this country but there were a couple of things I felt I needed to add to yesterday’s post. The first are the lines above from an 1819 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is the final verse from The Masque of Anarchy which was written in response to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England.

In August of 1819, a huge crowd of around 60,000 had gathered in Manchester to protest for parliamentary reforms which included manhood reform. At the time, only about 11% of adult British males were allowed to vote and that number was even much lower in Manchester and the rest of the industrial north. British forces were sent in to disperse the crowd and capture the protest leaders. The calvary, with sabres drawn, slammed into the crowd, in the process killing an estimated 18 protesters and injuring 400- 700 more.

Disturbed by the event, Shelley composed his poem. It has been called the first statement of the power of nonviolent resistance and has had huge influence over the past two centuries in rousing the oppressed many against the tyrannical few. Its final verse was recited by the students at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and by protesters during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. It has been the rallying cry for many union organizers.

These five lines are pretty powerful, then and now. The imagery of the masses of people who had sleepwalked their way into an intolerable situation suddenly awaking from that deep sleep with an emboldened defiant spirit and the realization that they are the many resonates in any time. 

Activist/ historian Howard Zinn has written of the power these lines as well as the power of music, art, poetry, and literature in rousing people to the fact there is power in their numbers. His words make me think of those things that have made America what it has represented for so many people around the world up to this point. It has been our freedom to think and create and openly express ourselves, which is rare in many parts of the world and something we have taken for granted here. Our greatest exports were not products or commodities, not cars or grain or oil.

No, our strength was built on those freedoms which the rest of the world witnessed in our music, our literature, our films, our art. It was our art that created the mythology of America, that ideal that spawned revolutions around the globe by daring others to follow our lead. It was our blues and jazz and rock and roll. It was the Technicolor dreams that came from Hollywood. It was the stories and myths of the Cowboy and the rugged individualists who forged the American West. 

Our greatest export was the idea of America.

To the rest of the world, especially those who lived under oppression and poverty, America represented a blank canvas on which anyone could paint their own picture.

And that is being taken away.

Fascists and authoritarian regimes have no tolerance for the inherent freedom of art except that which serves as propaganda. As I pointed out in an earlier post, art provides clarity. It helps us clearly see and understand despite the chaos of the situation at hand.

It is a light that cuts through the dark. 

Okay, I’ve had my say for a while.

The other thing I wanted to share was another Chumbawamba song that is very much pertinent to the moment. This is their 2005 version of Bella Ciao which is a song from the Italian Resistance who fought against the Nazis and Fascists in and before WWII. It was originally a folk song from the 19th century sung by workers in the rice paddies of Northern Italy as a protest against the harsh working conditions. 

Just keep this in mind: Ye are many – they are few…