Seven Year Art Project, Part 2

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More info on the seven year art project... This is part of the west wall in my office...about 18 canvases are visible here.
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Seven Year Art Project

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I have finished around 150 of these canvases over the last seven years. I started buying these 24" x 24" muslin cloths by the dozens from Archie Mcphee's years ago. Manufactured by various institutions for the blind--Maryland Workshop for the Blind and Mississippi Industries, they were intended to be instrument tray covers or something like that. I use them for paintings, mixed media assemblages, gift wrapping, but mainly for portraits. The cloths have been folded in a warehouse for decades, and the folds are pretty permanent. You can iron them out eventually. You can wash them, but then they lose all that sizing that keeps them stiff enough to draw on with pen and ink or Sharpies [tm]. So, the folds have become a part of, and defined this series of drawings.

The cloth is divided into 16 six inch squares. Each square contains one portrait, although I have six canvases that have six portraits in each square (or, 96 per canvas). I have done a few double ones, with two drawings in each square, and I have done a few abstract ones, still using the built in squares.

Hanging on the wall, in my office at work, are 123 of these canvases (I have 20 or so more folded up in a stack), and I have probably given away 20 or so over the years...
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Running Mates: Senators Lyndon Johnson And JFK

click to enlarge - I've been on some kind of LBJ jag the last few days...

I don't where or when this photo was taken. . .It feels like the campaign trail in the fall of 1960 (although it could be any time between July 1960 and November 1963). There aren't any microphones, so it must be before or after a speech or rally.

What is Senator Johnson saying--to the crowd?, to a person in the crowd? I'd like to know even more what Senator Jack Kennedy is saying and thinking. Between his concerned look and his arm reaching out for Lyndon's shoulder, I think he wanted to throw a muzzle on LBJ.
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Poem: James Wright

Forming a blessing on those trembling lips,
He dropped to his knees and sang out
As free as a bee and as drunk as Li-Po.
With no brush or quill, he made words
For the wind and lived to regret nothing.

At night, he summoned the old shades,
Their nods a gallery of applause
And leveled bony guiltfingers, history's dare:
The thing itself justifies the shuffle.
Hung over the void on a bouncing limb,
He watched Norwegian rats nibble the roots,
Edging the tree further into the dark.
He knew, as well as you, that the branch would break.
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The Johnson Treatment, Part 5: Senator Richard Russell (Dem., Georgia) Undergoes The Treatment

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Senator Richard Russell was a powerful 30+ year veteran in the Senate. He was the king of the senate--what Lyndon would later become.

He helped LBJ learn the ropes when he was a freshman Senator. That didn't get him off the hook from The Johnson Treatment.
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Happy Mother's Day, Mothers

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The Johnson Treatment, Part 4: President Johnson Gives The Treatment To Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas

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Even though he was a friend, Abe Fortas, newly nominated justice of the Supreme Court, gets a taste of The Johnson Treatment in 1965.
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Poem: Falling

Falling is not the problem:
It's the absence of silk
And earth appearing.
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The Johnson Treatment, Part 3: LBJ Gives Eartha Kitt The Treatment

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Moments before this photograph was taken, at a White House luncheon given by Lady Bird, the actress Eartha Kitt stood up and denounced LBJ for sending children off to die in Vietnam. LBJ happened at that moment to pass by and saw that Lady Bird was upset.

Eartha Kitt tells the story:

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, I was invited by Lady Bird Johnson to give my opinion about the problems in the United States, specifically, "Why is there so much juvenile delinquency in the streets of America?" The First Lady seemed to be more interested in decorating the windows of the ghettos with flowerboxes. I mean—it's fine to put flowers in the ghettos, but let's take care of the necessities first: give people jobs, and find a way to get us out of poverty.

When it came my turn to speak, I said to the president's wife, "Vietnam is the main reason we are having trouble with the youth of America. It is a war without explanation or reason."

I said that the young ghetto boys thought it better to have a legal stigma against them—then they would be considered "undesirable" and would not be sent to the war. In their opinion, in this society the good guys lost and the bad guys won. "

I don't know what he said to her, but his press office painted her to reporters as a harridan who pissed on her host's carpet. Almost needless to say, she soon had the FBI crawling all over her in addition to having her tax returns exhaustively audited.

Almost immediately, all her acting and singing work evaporated, and she was eventually forced to move to Europe to make a living.

Eartha Kitt is still around and performing more than 30 years after LBJ gave up the ghost. When Eartha comes to Seattle, my friend Milo Petersen plays drums during her run at Jazz Alley.
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The Johnson Treatment, Part 2: Richard M. Nixon, Republican Presidential Front-runner Gets The Treatment

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I can't find the provenance of this photograph, but it must be 1968, probably after Lyndon had bowed out of the election, and when Richard M. Nixon, Presidential hopeful, emerged as the front-runner in the Presidential sweepstakes.

I don't remember ever reading about this meeting. In any case, Richard Nixon looks like he's getting The Johnson Treatment. President Johnson has him surrounded! One was enough...The Trickster got three LBJs!
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The Johnson Treatment

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LBJ once asked a reporter:

• "Why do you come and ask me, the leader of the Western world, a chicken-shit question like that?"

In these pictures, Lyndon as majority leader in the Senate takes Theodore F. Green, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a ride.

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Poem: [Life Is Not A Hardy Novel]

Life is not like a Hardy novel,
'Though it seems so at times.
God's not mad at us;
But his patience is stretched
To a molecule thick.
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