This painting is another of the Exiles series, its title, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, taken from a group of Depression-era photos of sharecroppers in the American dust bowl from the camera of Walker Evans. I have always been taken with these portraits as well of those of Dorothea Lange. There is a sense dignity and will that has an eternal quality as though anyone in anytime in any culture would know and could empathize with their sorrow, their struggle.
That universal feeling is what I had hoped for this piece. I am never sure it hit that particular mark but there is something quite haunting for me in this slightly alien face and the sadness written in his face. He is a true exile…
Redtree Times 