America is at war right now but you'd never know it from any kind of
personal experience, unless you're serving in the military or know
someone who is.  Most of us
are asked to make no sacrifice, there is no meaningful national debate
about the war's prosecution or aims — just a lot of
ideological posturing, on both ends of the political spectrum. 
With a volunteer army,
aided by thousands of private mercenaries, there is no direct pressure
on the nation as a nation to come to terms with what's happening. 
They are fighting the war for us, unless they happen to be our own sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives.



Whatever you think of the war, I think you have to admit that the
current administration has committed the one unforgivable sin for the
leadership of a democracy — sending soldiers into a war without the
broad commitment of the nation behind them.  Any war that we, the people, don't fight together is bound to turn into a bad one and very likely into a losing one.



Look at the image above by Norman Rockwell, from a Saturday Evening Post
cover.  The young soldier, obviously just back from the Pacific
Theater, is a Marine.  Viewers of the time would know that he most
likely is just back from Hell, from Iwo Jima or Peleliu or Okinawa — that he has
participated in unimaginable horrors.  There is no glimmer of
triumph or satisfaction in his face, just a sense of awe, of almost
bewildered hardness.  The folks who make up his audience seem to
appreciate, even if there's no way they could possibly understand,
what's he just done for them, and one thing he's just done for them is
separate himself from their world irrevocably, forever.



They seem to comprehend this — they all seem suffused with the gravity of it, they all seem to take responsibility for it.



This is so far beyond catchphrases like “We support our troops.” 
The image reflects a moral complexity, a moral tenderness, that only art can evoke — an
ideal of citizenship that seems to have vanished from our democracy.

I painted the image above on the wall of a farmhouse in Vermont
sometime in the late Sixties.  For some reason the owners of the
farmhouse decided not to paint over it and so it has survived for going
on 40 years, as I just discovered via this photograph of it, taken by a
friend last Sunday when he was visiting the place.



The design is kind of cool, even if the draftsmanship leaves something
to be desired.  It still sums up what the Sixties felt like to me
at the time, when the idea of being patrotic about American culture
made more sense than being patriotic about the American state.

Here’s Robert McGinnis‘s evocation of a Vegas showgirl.  A master of paperback cover art for pulp fiction, McGinnis got the point-of-sale appeal of such covers down to a science.  I’d buy whatever book this painting graced the cover of, even though I knew in my heart that it would never live up to the image’s promise.

In this imaginary portrait of a boy from Togo, Amy Crehore plays with
space in an interesting way.  The low relief of the central figure is
accentuated by placing him against a flat wall decorated with flat
images.  It's as though he's emerging from the surface of the
wall, entering space, tentatively.

It drives me crazy when people talk about works of Pop Art as though
they somehow belong in the same category as traditional high art — as
though it makes any sense at all to talk about the oeuvre of Andy Warhol in the same breath as the oeuvre
of Jan Van Eyck, just because they tend to be grouped that way by the academy
and by art institutions.  I actually think it's a sign of clinical
insanity, culturally speaking.



But that doesn't mean that works of Pop Art aren't unspeakably cool.  The Lichtenstein above is unspeakably cool.

Here’s a link (via the ever illuminating Little Hokum Rag) to the amazing paintings of Shiori
Matsumoto.  Just go to her site, click on Gallery and take a tour
through a previously uncharted precinct of Dreamland — east of
Tenniel’s Wonderland, west of the Henri Rousseau Rainforest, just down
the street from Chris Van Allsburg’s grandmother’s house.  (Certain
traveling players pass between this region’s playhouses
and those on Amy Crehore’s Naughty Wondershow Theatrical Circuit,
exercising the craft and mystery of an art long thought lost.)

[Images © Shiori Matsumoto]

People who find an image like this excessively sentimental have simply
lost touch with reality — have learned to reject reflexively any work
which appeals too directly to the heart.



The image is contrived, certainly, in posing its subject between the
doll of childhood and the glamorized icon of womanhood, but there is
nothing contrived about the artist's subversive intention here. 
The painting was made for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post,
which trafficked (at least in its advertising) in glamorous images of
women, like the one that is here filling a beautiful child's head with
doubt about her own attractiveness.



Rockwell's “Americana”, often seen as a sugar-coated lie, had its sharp
side.  If this image doesn't make you just a little bit angry, and
deeply suspicious of a culture that seduces young women into such
self-doubt, then I think you just aren't seeing what's plainly there in front of you.

Amy Crehore, the artist whose blog Little Hokum Rag offers a running
record of the images that inspire her, has posted a first look at a new
painting — teasing us with just some details for now.  One of the
virtues of the Internet is allowing artists to share their productions
in real time like this — the paint on Crehore’s canvas is probably not
even dry yet.  It’s the virtual equivalent to a “visit to the
artist’s studio”, always considered a privilege of the well-connected
connoisseur.

[Update — the whole painting has now been revealed on Crehore’s site and it’s really wonderful.]