That's Mr. Award Winning Artist to you

 

The poster for my next show at Ravenworks Gallery in Johnson City, TN.  All are welcome except for anyone named Iwaniszek. 

Also, I won the Believe in Bristol Art in unusual places contest. Once the art goes up, I'll post photos of it.

Some new art

 

I turned my maternal grandma into a country music singer. Turns out all my mother's side of the family hated my crazy ass bitch aunt who used me and my siblings as props so the small town she dragged us to would think what a great Christian she was. 

Spring mask. Spring in the mountains of east TN is a mixed bag of crazy ass weather, Hence the crazy colorful plants waiting to poke through the ground.

Some recent art works

 

Sunday Morning

Jiving Johnny Copeland

Jazz Mon Amore

Penny's Midsummer Night's Dream

Victory formation

A new work

The Anxious Cat. 

(Acrylic and marker on 30x38" canvas)

This work is all one line. I started with my marker on the canvas and filled in the spaces with paint.

 

I'm a real artist now!

My first solo art show was a huge success. Sold many works, got two more promises of sshows in the pipeline for next year, and made many new friends.

Thank you to Leslie at Ravenworks for taking a chance on me and for believing in me. All my haters, all the galleries who turned me down, and especially that greedy pig who calls himself my brother can suck it. 

 

National Bird Night 1973

                  National Bird Night 1973. (Acrylic, ink, markers, and paper on 24x30" canvas)

1973 was one of the worst years ever for me. In late winter/early spring in Detroit an incompetent doctor killed my mother on an operating table. I was not ten years old yet and I had watched my big sister Linda get hit and killed by a car and then a little over two years later I lost the most important person in my life, my mom. We, my remaining siblings and I were forced to go live in a farm, in what turned out to be the Klu Klux Klan HQ of Michigan, with my dad's half sister, her adulterous husband who was obsessed with proving at all times that he was the Alpha male, and their bullying children. It was made clear from day one that they came first and we were second class citizens in a place I did not want to be. I was bullied by my aunt and uncle, whipped with belts, slapped, kicked, and under constant threat of violence. Many foster kids had it worse but any abuse of children, especially ones suffering the trauma I was suffering, was wrong. And to this day my bullying cousins refuse to admit they bullied me. Too bad their parents are dead because I wanted them to admit how badly they treated me and my siblings and to spit on them to show my contempt.  Still though, dancing on their graves is pretty satisfying. 

This work represents on one level my mom leaving my physical life and on another it represents the gains made by women in the fight for equality. I added bits of color to the female figures to give a nod to all the courageous women of color who had it worse than white women. And the crow/raven has long been associated with death in western art.
 

National Bird Night 1972

National Bird Night 1972

(Acrylic, ink, and paper on 20x24" canvas)

In 1972 things looked dark for all of us. Nixon was bombing the shit out of Vietnam, his war on drugs was really a war on black and brown dissent after years of institutional racism, and we had four more years of putting up with him after the election in 1972. Watergate had went down but no one knew yet it would bring Nixon down and cement his place in history s a crook. 

On the bright side George McGovern had opened up the Democratic party and broke the death grip that old white men held on the party at that time. He helped open the door for women, more people of color, and LGBTQ people to come inside the previously smoke filled backrooms where the real decisions were made in the Democratic party. We also saw the great Shirley Chisholm run for the Democratic Party nomination. She was a black woman and for her to run was a heroic and historic thing to do, women, especially black women had historically been shut out of the corridors of power and she helped lead the way for many more to come after her in her wake. She and McGovern remain some of my heroes.

The lavender bird represents the breakthroughs the gay community was making in the USA and worldwide. They had been labeled as mentally ill for being born homosexual. I remember my mom insisting us children go upstairs when a gay man my dad became friends with in a mental hospital came over to visit him at our home. It's sad to think my late sweet little momma swallowed the lies that went around about gay folks back then, she was afraid he was going to molest us or some shit while across the street from us was a Catholic church full of priests who were raping kids and everyone looked the other way. 

The dark background represents the unease I felt at the time. Things looked bleak to me. Four more years of war, police brutality, state sanctioned oppression of anyone who disagreed with Nixon, and more of dealing with the trauma of watching my sister get killed and how it affected my mother. I was ten years old and I thought things got better as you got older. I found out the next year how wrong I was.

More new art

 

Ode to Jimmy Dale. (Acrylic, paper, watercolor, oil based marker, marker, and buttons on 40x30" canvas) #outsiderart #stevedentonart #folkart #women #dogs #countrymusic #collage

Before and after

I bought about 20 mid century magazines at an estate sale last week.  These awesome pictures are from an issue of Seventeen from May 1947.  I had no idea Seventeen used to be an oversize magazine.   It struck me as I was going through it and choosing what to scan from it, that my mother was a teenager in 1947, so she may had owned a copy or seen a copy of this same magazine on the newsstands in Detroit. 

Some new works

‘The spirit that saved Linda’ (acrylic on 24x20" canvas).

‘Sexxy Cat Champion Again!’ (mixed media on 24x18" canvas).

False Flag

Here's a new work of mine:

'I don't buy into that red state/blue state crap the corporate media keeps pushing on us' (acrylic and ink on 16x20" canvas).

Inspiration

I draw a lot of artistic inspiration from mid century jazz album covers.

Exactly

Any publicity is good publicity

It's an honor just to be noticed.

Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine was a 20th century Russian born artist.  He studied painting in Finland and then moved to France where he lived and worked.  He was a contemporary and friend of many modern artists including Modigliani, who painted his portrait twice.  

Soutine was well regarded among his fellow artists and art dealers who recognized his genius. One dealer was so impressed by Soutine's work that he paid him cash for 60 paintings.  Soutine took the cash, ran out in the street in Paris, hailed a cab, and had it take him to Nice, a city on the southern coast of France that was a favorite destination for artists living in France between World War 1 and World War 2. 

He managed to avoid serving in the first world war, which was a minor miracle.  But his Jewish roots caught up to him in Nazi occupied France in the second world war.  Soutine had to stay on the run to avoid getting captured and sent to a concentration camp.  He suffered from some health problems, including ulcers, which went untreated due to having to stay one step ahead of the fascists.  He died of a perforated ulcer in 1943 while hiding in a forest in France. 

Today, some of his work sells for millions of dollars at auction.  And many of his paintings survive in collections and in museums around the world.

But the world was robbed of all the other paintings he would have made if he had not been indirectly killed by the Nazis. Soutine's life and untimely death remind us that fascists not only stole and looted priceless works of art during their years in power in Germany, they also directly and indirectly caused the deaths of artists, both male and female, the world has come to see as modern masters of art.

This is why it's important to keep making art and to keep fighting against all fascists everywhere, both here in the USA in the form of the alt right, white nationalists, and the orange asshole in the White House who wants a ban on Muslims, and those world wide, especially in Europe and the UK. Fascists hate free speech, entertainment, and art, because all those things are used against them. Keep up the fight and keep artists remembering who's lives were cut short by fascists.

Sorry to have missed you

This artist wasn't participating in the handmade art show we went to the other day.  I wish they had been, I liked their work and wanted to see more of it.  Oh well.  Like the Stones said, you can't always get what you want.

Anyway, I'm still fixated on birds in my art right now.  So I go get back to work.

Cheep cheep

'All the birds we saw that day' (acrylic and marker on 18x24" canvas).

Art for art's sake

Some art from this year's fall River Arts District studio stroll in Asheville, NC.

Outdoor art in Asheville's River Arts District

I can't wait to go back and take more photos of this wonderful art.

Making art again

Making some new art again and this time I'm exploring new themes and images along with using some of the tools this digital age has to offer. I love the colors I can get using the computer.  I'll cut these birds out and use them in other pieces soon.