This piece is one among several portraits in a series called American Heritage. This series’ goal is to show historical and contemporary American
figures in unique contexts – portraits from their youth, at significant times, or portraits not of the people the piece might be about, but of people that
are significant to them and what they became.

In my work I often try to use images that are visually banal, in an effort to highlight the image’s objective qualities. This makes what I create not
about aesthetic beauty but more about the ideas the image might hold and the significance of what it depicts. This is the case with the King portrait

This very standard, almost mundane photograph of King was taken in 1955, arguably the year The Civil Rights movement had its biggest turn
around. The murder of Emmett Till happened in the Summer of 1955 and The Montgomery Bus Boycott began that winter. During that summer
King received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Systematic Theology from Boston University.

Now living in Montgomery, King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, making him the official spokes person for the
Bus Boycott. At only the age of 26, King’s presence in the American spotlight began. He soon became a household name. This time period marks
the beginning of an American figure who would ultimately have a national holiday named in his honor.

 

This portrait was recently acquired by The University of Illinois to be displayed in remembrance of Kris Campbell, the former Assistant Vice
President of Academic Affairs and a founder of the University’s Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration.

This piece was a part of Accepted Knowing at Figure One Gallery. This was the one out of three pieces I summited to the exhibition that
was accepted. Here and here are the other two proposals.

Holiday Video statement for Accepted Knowing:

This work is a reproduction of George Holliday’s home video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King. Compositionally, it emulates the layout
of YouTube, showing the 1991 event in a contemporary format, 20 years after it was seen repeatedly on television. The pervasiveness of
this footage, in its time, foreshadowed the Information Age. It was seen by the public with a level of accessibility that can be compared to
significant national and world events today. Imagine the revolutions and conflicts in Egypt and Libya without mobile devices and digital
media. By presenting this historical event in a YouTube format, this work comments on our faith in, and dependency on, instant knowledge.

Through the public eye, this video was seen as a smoking gun. The officers in this video, however, were acquitted in The California State
Court, leading to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Common sayings like “The camera never lies” and “Seeing is believing” allude to our
perception of video and our reliance on its ability to tell the truth. Video, like any form of documentation is a part of history. “All of history
is an archaeological attempt to construct coherent, finite stories from artifacts, yet artifacts (including pictures) are not simply facts.” *
This is the dilemma, we give visual information more weight than it deserves. Seeing is equated directly to knowing.

In my work, treating the image as an object is very important. These 9 images are drawings, rendered in chalk pastel. This is an unnecessary,
arcane and arbitrary way to make an image. The idea is to bring new relevance to the re-creation of images. The source image is not simply
a reference, but wholly the work’s model. This work is not solely about the beating of Rodney King nor is it a vehicle to subjectively show
the event. It is about how and why those images of the beating were created, and their historical and cultural importance. I am trying to find
new ways to recreate images, but still craft these works with traditional materials. I hope to highlight the gravity of these images and,
in some cases, their banality.

Note
* “The Heritage VI, 1996,” in Luc Tuymans, essay by Joshua Shirkey, p.138 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/ Wexner Center
for the Arts/D.A.P.; First Edition, October 31, 2009)

 
jason@jasonpattersonart.com

These two Drawings were completed over the Easter weekend. The first is significant to Good Friday and Easter. The second is related to the first through the history they both are a part of. These are both History Paintings, or History Drawings. A genre I hope all my work at least touches on in some way.

The first piece is of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Good Friday arrest in Birmingham. This arrest prompted King’s famous essay Letter From Birmingham Jail. The source of the drawing is news footage used in the documentary Citizen King. A doc covering King’s work from 1963 up to his death in ’68. One thing I really liked about the film was that it didn’t focus too much on King as a greatly remembered martyr or a man of Saintly attributes. Not that he shouldn’t be remembered that way. The movie talks about him as an activist during what can be argued as our nation’s most difficult time, since the Civil War. It shows King’s faults and the dissent he faced, within the movement.

That being said, watching footage of people kneeling while he passes them, leading up to the arrest, is quite moving and does show the unique impact and importance Dr. King held. This is evidence of how fundamental he was to the movement and what he meant to the African American community in the 60′s. Ironically though, and maybe even morbidly(as far as comparisons go), while working on this piece I kept coming back to or thinking off Richter’s Herr Heyde.

 


 
The second drawing is of Robert Kennedy towards the end of his time as Attorney General. Next to him is John Lewis. Lewis is now a Congressman from Georgia, in 1964 he was 24 years old and chairman of SNCC. The men are standing in a group behind President Johnson while he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.(Side Note: If you watch video of the signing you can see J. Edger Hoover eagerly waiting to receive one of the bill signing pens. This strikes me as odd based on how relatively racist Hoover was and how much he tried to throw a wrench in the Civil Rights movement or at least the work King was doing.)

To make this drawing I looked at the era that really took hold of History Painting, Neo Classical or Academy painting in the 18th and early 19th centuries. I was especially thinking of Ingres’ The Coronation of Napoleon. I wanted this piece to look like a detail of a grander piece, like The Coronation, but focused on key characters involved in the creation of the event being depicted.

These drawings were fun.

 

Good Friday. Birmingham, AL, 1963

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy & Chairman of SNCC John Lewis
Signing of Civil Rights Bill, July 2nd 1964

Both chalk pastel on raw canvas
under clear acrylic, 2011
12x9in & 20x20in

jason@jasonpattersonart.com

A sub-project in my current work will be a series of internet video stills posted on my flickr page and gathered in this set. The
sources will either be from videos posted online or videos that have been downloaded. There also might be a few jpgs.

At its very base, my current work is about looking at visual media objectively, with a historic or History Painting approach.
I like to think of these stills as sketches. Presenting the image on my flickr, instead of recreating it on canvas.

jason@jasonpattersonart.com

Lumumba & The Nose
By Luc Tuymans

Now that I am done with Twenty Three Portraits I’ve been able to look at the work somewhat retrospectively. However absurd sounding that is(It opening only three weeks ago). I made the 23 very quickly, very mechanically, 26 portraits in about 44 days. I just saw shades of gray and grid on canvas, while in the midst of the project. The speed and efficiency of this series was new for me. Much of that can be attributed to my visit in October to the MCA in Chicago where I saw the Luc Tuymans retrospective. Being largely, almost too obviously, influenced by Richter, I’ve always put any ideas of “painterly freedom” out of my mind. I suppose, me still being a naive young artist, I was under the impression that if I wanted to make a drawing of a video still, look like that video still, it couldn’t, at the same time, look like a painting or drawing. This changed after seeing Tuymans. My favorite parts of the show were being able to see the pencil lines under the thinly applied paint, how amazingly loose the works were and how most of them were done in one sitting. With all that, its was still obvious the source images for these works came from magazines, newspapers and google searches.

 

Four of Twenty Three: Lila Bromwell Benton,Beverly Greene, Sybil Mobley & Helen Johnson
Charcoal & pastel on raw canvas under polymer glaze & varnish. 2010-11

 
Because of the Tuymans exhibit, when making the 23 I shortened the list of things to worry about while rendering each portrait. I didn’t really worry about the grid being visible. I did my best to make the charcoal and pastel cake and look heavy or painterly, especially with the portraits with saturated white backgrounds. But in some, I thinned the layers, keeping some transparency. This project was one of the first charcoal-pastel-on-canvas projects where I really used the original gray pastel ground in the finished piece. Several of the portraits’ pastel underpainting(underdrawing?) was used as the mid tone. Something I almost never do.

While writing this short post it has not escaped me that I’m talking about drawing like its painting. If anything thats telling me I’m on the right track. If it makes any sense, I’d like the work I do with pastel to look objectively not just at the images they’re showing, but also look objectively at painting itself.

 

Progress image of Abraham Zapruder piece. Apart of next months group show.
Pastel & charcoal on raw canvas.

 
jason@jasonpattersonart.com

These works, while recognizing the importance of these women, also look at the historical convention and concept of The Portrait, specifically in the public and academic context. How do we perceive images of people, painted or photographed, on the walls of government buildings or in university halls? What positive or negative effects does this tradition have on us consciously and subconsciously? What new ideas, perceptions or understandings can be realized when these Twenty Three Portraits compositionally adhere to, but at the same time contrast, the traditional motifs of classic portraiture?

EXHIBITION OPENING
Thursday, February 24, 2011 7:00-9:00 pm
Artist talk at 8:00
Murphy Gallery @ the Y
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND FEMINIST ACTIVISM
Beverly Guy Sheftall, Director, Women’s Research and Resource Center, Spelman College
Thursday, March 17, 2011 7:30 pm
Murphy Gallery @ the Y
Art @ the Y
University YMCA, 1001 South Wright Street, Champaign, IL
Exhibition sponsored by: Art @ the Y, an initiative of the University YMCA, the YWCA of the University of Illinois, SHURE, and Jonathan Pines/Private Studios

 
jason@jasonpattersonart.com

What I find interesting is that we, people of the 20th and 21st centuries, perceive this image and images like it as true or acceptable representations of life. Even though they
look so different from the information our eye gives us when we look out the window or into a crowd. If an images appears to have been created by a camera, despite the
quality, we accept its authenticity. A result of photography and or video being essential tools, in the exchange of information, going back 150 years.

jason@jasonpattersonart.com

 

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

 

The CMYK slaves were about American Slavery, communicated through contemporary and traditional motifs. Not necessarily or directly about The Civil
Rights Movement. This Krusty piece’s concept is focused on my process of painting and creating a work, more than it is about the way we receive
entertainment or media(the main focus in Internet Video Project). But I’d like to think it is getting at that or opening the door to that subject.

Without going to much into this piece or getting ahead of myself, before it’s finished… What I’d like to show in this piece is the way I design or
find the compositions of a work. I want to show the process of a piece. I am doing that by treating an unfinished design like a finished one.
Stopping the process in the middle and treating that incomplete image like a finished image. I almost always arrange, size and figure out my
subjects in Photoshop. With this I am stopping that process halfway through and painting the rough image as is.

I’m waiting for the over sized black lines to dry before adding the color. Hopefully the paint will be ready sometime next week and I’ll be
ready to complete the piece and have a full post on its ideas and purpose.

jason@jasonpattersonart.com

 

Up until The Great Migration, African Americans were the majority in Mississippi. Taking advantage of this, the on going Reconstruction and Jim Crow Laws not yet taking effect, Revels began a political career in Mississippi in 1868, after moving there with his family and filling a pastorship.

In 1870 when Revels was elected to the United States Senate he faced opposition. Democrats of the time claimed Revels had not been an actual citizen for at least 9 years, which was a requirement for Senators. Despite Revels having been born free in 1822. The Democrats used the Dred Scott case to defend their stance. Remarkably, even in the 1870′s The Dred Scott decision was though by many politicians as a disgrace.

“I never expected to hear read in the Senate of the United States, or any court of justice where authority was
looked for, the Dred Scott decision.” – Senator James Nye of Nevada

Revels was eventually allowed into the Senate. Although he only served one year he went on to become the first president and a professor of philosophy at what is now known as Alcorn State University in Mississippi. And in 1873 he served as interim Mississippi Secretary Of State.

 

 

Like many of my pieces, I drew Revels on raw canvas. I used an oval frame and cut out a stencil of Revels so I was able to placed his bust currently without having to grid the entire canvas.

 

 

Originally I wanted the background to be a light gray. But that was showing to be very flat, with bad depth and poor contrast. While looking at work by Kerry James Marshall and Don Pollack’s Lincoln Project, I decided to make the piece a bit more rustic or more of its era, made simply and humbly, as if it was created by one of Revels’ supporters. Not unlike a campaign button or poster from the 19th century. I used blue pastel on the background and added a excerpt from the Mississippi State Constitution’s Preamble, which in full states: “We, the people of Mississippi in convention assembled, grateful to Almighty God, and invoking his blessing on our work, do ordain and establish this constitution.”

 

 

I want the quote to, of course, hold the obvious relevance, that it is from the Constitution of the state Revels was a Senator of. But these words’ literal reference is to God. And paired with an image of Revels, I’d like them to represent his deep religious beliefs. But more conceptually I’d like them or the word “his”, to refer to Revels himself. As a statement read by later generations. Taking Inspiration from the self made American who held education and work to the highest standard.

jason@jasonpattersonart.com