Many of my closest friends and colleagues are aware that I have embarked on my third vocation. I find that in my life, periodically (about every 25 years…) I long for a change from my current career to something new and challenging. I think most people do. But instead of staying in place, unhappily dreaming about some escape fantasy, I find myself moving on and like a root-bound plant, “repotting” myself. First from dentistry to management consulting, and the practice of law, and now to fine art. This time the “repotting” takes me all the way back to my childhood and undergraduate training as an artist. I have been an artist most of my life, but practical needs for income, and educational and professional choices influenced by my parents and other mentors in my life got in the way of an active art career. Now, after decades of professional life in dentistry, consulting, and law, I am writing my next life chapter as a fine artist. I am a painter. My primary medium is watercolor, but I also paint with acrylic, gouache, and oil paints.
I have a number of pieces I will be offering for sale on a soon-to-be-launched website, now under construction. But this piece is so timely, I felt it needed an immediate exposure and availability for sale of the prints. As Squeak Carnwath of UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice says, “I feel that we’re all creating and recording history. And it may not be the history of world wars – or it might be. But it’s really an important history. It’s visual culture. And it’s different from stuff that’s written in books.”
This piece is just that kind of history. It represents an intersection between popular media creating a persona who then becomes overwhelmed by his own ego, and the damage he causes by his influence on a susceptible population desperately seeking to prove that the dissatisfaction with their own lives is someone else’s fault. I understand, as Mark Twain once said “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
The name of this piece is “A Presidential Portrait.” All art is derivative, and this piece is reminiscent of a piece showing Hitler viewing the burning of books in the Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933. This is a photo of my original watercolor, acrylic and gouache painting on canvas. Giclée prints of this are available for $250.00 each plus tax and shipping, on archival quality water color paper with archival inks. Framed copies are also available for $$349.00 plus tax and shipping. I am donating $100.00 from each sale to environmental organizations. If you want to purchase a print, contact me through the Messenger app and give me your telephone number. I’ll call you and arrange for payment using Square, and get a shipping address.
My printer made a comment about the irony of this piece. “Although it portrays one of the darkest moments in American history, it might sell quite well among the MAGA crowd.” I’m fine with that too. We’ll see where the arc of truth and justice takes #45. Meanwhile, we need to remember that democracy is fragile, and fascism can make very ordinary people do extraordinarily dark things. I’ve recorded a little slice of history in a way that cannot be expressed in words.
Jay Hislop
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Dr. Jay Hislop's Blog 