The portrait of the young woman with maquette and study( blue colored pencil & black gesso on gray cardboard).
This new portrait is my contribution to an up coming exhibition. As the title explains, it is an image of a woman in the crowd during the funeral for three of the four girls killed in
the bombing at the Thirteenth Street Baptist Church in ’63. The image was taken from Spike Lee’s documentary Four Little Girls. I watched this doc several time while
working on Civil Rights Project and this image always stood out to me. What it really reminded me of was early Renaissance profile portraiture. Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Piero della Francesca, Alesso Baldovinetti, etc.. Also, recently, I’ve been looking at alot of Daguerreotypes, especially The Art Institute of Chicago’s Frederick Douglass
portrait and Harvard’s collection. This motivated the oval.
Working on this piece was pretty strait forward. While keeping in mind the early Renaissance and the Daguerreotype compositions, I still wanted to make sure the feeling of
film and or journalistic media was at least subtly present. I did not want the concept that this is a drawing of a photograph not a drawing from a photograph, to be completely
lost. I’m happy with this work’s result.
Another catalyst to creating this piece was my recent visit to the MCA in Chicago. I saw the Luc Tuymans retrospective. Among my favorite pieces was The Heritage VI.
Out of context the painting is of a fatherly, friendly looking man. But the man is Joseph Milteer a Ku Klux Klansman. The piece was done in 1996 shortly after the ’95
Oklahoma City Bombing. Tuymans painted Milteer to comment on America’s first assumption on the bombing, that it must have been a foreign attack.
Joshua Shirkey on The Heritage VI:
” After the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, many Americans were quick to blame the attack on foreigners, only to learn later that homegrown extremists were responsible.
For Tuymans, these events distilled American culture, in which an ostensible commitment to individualism is in fact subordinate to an intense need for superficial perfection,
wholesomeness, and conformity. Conflicting priorities whose structural tension produces divisiveness and intolerance.”
Reflecting on what happened in ’95 and the tragedy in ’63, along with all the horrible events during the Civil Rights era. We, as Americans, do remember and give reasonable
weight, historically, to these incidents. But we sometimes fail to recount or categorize them for what they absolutely were: textbook acts of terrorism. Especially in Birmingham.
Four men planted and detonated dynamite at a church that was the primary meeting place for the equal rights effort in that city. They used the highest level of violence in
attempts to intimidate and disrupt what they saw as the opposition to their way of life. Just like in Oklahoma by an American and just like on 9/11 by foreigners . At times, we
are able to easily ignore what we are capable of. And when we can’t disregard, we cleverly miss label events or fail to compare what we’ve done, to similar horrors others
have committed. The genocide in Rwanda and Darfur is not unlike the Untied States’ treatment of Native Americans. This 1963 church bombing and the many other violent
doings carried out by the KKK and other anti equal rights groups, from the late 19th century, through the mid 20th century, can easily be equated to the unrest and terrorist
attacks in Israel and Palestine. Claiming our mistakes is not relatively difficult for us. But drawing parallels and comparing our atrocities to the ones done by others is
seldom seen.
jason@jasonpattersonart.com
Filed under: Civil Rights Project, Other Artists & Influences, Portraits
