Our Lady of American History

OUR LADY OF AMERICAN HISTORY is an ink on paper drawing of a black woman who represents American history. I am using the idea of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to make a point about the history of marginalized people in the United States, specifically African Americans. In Catholicism, Icons are images of holy people who represent a particular kind of holiness. I have created an Icon for Americans so that we may reflect on our history which includes a history full of injustices. In not recognizing the injustices of the past we can never fully understand our present. History gives us the means to understand why things are the way they are. Nothing that is good or bad stands alone—all of it runs deep within the generations that have built our country to what it is now—and that history includes All of us. We must accept the good, the bad, and the ugly of who we are so that we can move forward together. 

Fairytales

Fairytales

The Beech tree’s texture and curves

inspire me to place lines on a page,

never in proportion,

never its character portrayed,

to much time and dedication

my young ignorance used to fill.

I now draw the memories,

the generalized notions of trees,

is it laziness?

or a moving-on

in creating my visual poems,

my fairytales

about the beings I so love.

Night Songs

Unravel

UNRAVEL is an ink-on-paper drawing of a black man’s face unraveling. As an educator, I learned to manage my biases, at least as a process of reflection needed to work with children to develop a positive learning environment for my students regardless of race, gender, and all the diverse learning factors a teacher has in her classroom. I thought my journey in understanding prejudice and bias was our country’s journey. I naively thought the civil rights movement had seeped into white people’s skin and that our road to conquering racism was not complete but was going in a productive direction. Oh. My. God. How I was wrong! The 2016 presidential election was startling as to how wrong I was, prompting this drawing and others. The election of our forty-fifth president mortified me. I started questioning the moral compass of my family and friends who voted for him and supported his divisiveness and lies. It was as though the solid ground had shifted beneath my feet.

Doctrine of Discovery

THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY in an ink-on-paper drawing.  The title and the image address the history of how the Catholic Church defined how European explorers to the Americans treated indigenous Americans. Christopher Columbus wanted to find his fortune, and the only way to do it was to conquer the native people he encountered with the total weight of the Church behind him. Since these Americans were not Christian, there was no need to consider them as fully human—a perspective still embedded in today’s culture. We are fine dehumanizing others who are non-believers—it has even become a political strategy for those who need to divide and conquer. Dehumanization is easy for any religion that can only see its own reflection. When conservative Christians say that we are a Christian nation, it is this ideology that makes them correct.

This idea of having an absolute, unquestionable truth is the most violent ideology in the history of humanity, and Christianity makes no apologies for it. One can categorize people into two separate, distinct groups of believers and non-believers, equal human and non-human. The Catholic Church has regrets for what this ideology has done but still will not concede to its destructiveness and change its perspective. I suppose the reforms of Vatican II tried to address this rigid stance on truth through its social justice doctrine. Still, sadly, many American Catholics want nothing to do with it and continue their march toward injustice and death to the non-believers.

The "Dark" Journey Forward

THE CONVERSATION is a ballpoint pen drawing I completed in my visual journal, as are many of the drawings in this book. Drawing in my writing journal help me connect my life to my art. My images emerge into symbols that represent my view of the world. Drawing with a ballpoint pen started as I transitioned from writing to drawing within my journal. I found that a ballpoint pen was like a pencil in how I could build value. The ballpoint pen could create these beautiful delicate lines, a technique seen in much of my work, becoming a unique tool for the ideas I want to express.

While exploring ideas with a ballpoint pen, I was finding my way out of Catholicism. My ballpoint pen drawings helped with my journey forward. As I stepped away from organized religion in my late thirties and early forties, I’ve been refashioning my visual world by taking the religious Icons of the Church down from the altars and placing them in nature with me. Through my drawings, I have liberated a few saints (THE CONVERSATION) and Jesus’s mother, Mary (UNSPOKEN HISTORY III). 

I’ve been told. I have a dark aesthetic. As a teenager, I enjoyed drawing these “dark” images using graphite pencil, which isn’t so different from what I do now with a ballpoint pen. Therefore, I’ve developed a few theories about why I have this dark aesthetic and why it has been so rooted in my expression throughout my life.

I enjoy the control of my pencil or pen and my ability to develop value. I want my drawings to have meaning so the viewer “reads” my drawings like one might read a story. These “stories” are not true renderings of nature but the juxtaposition of symbols reflecting nature, giving my drawings a surrealistic quality that often translates to “dark.” Symbols aren’t necessarily happy or sad but are intended to touch the viewer’s mind to prompt a thought. Many viewers of my art understand this, and the “darkness” is irrelevant because they know what the drawing is about—at least, what it means to them.

Another explanation for my “darkness” is that as far back as I can remember, I attended Catholic Mass in which my visual experiences were of a statue of a mostly naked man, nailed and bleeding from a cross, with a figure of his mother on the side altar expressing her deep sorrow for her son’s death. Much of the visual symbolism of Catholicism is dark, right? I can’t help but think my symbolism is directly related to the symbols I was surrounded with most of my life. The characters of Catholicism told stories of the life of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints—an experience that influenced my ability to create symbols and tell visual stories—and why I need to refashion these symbols to my new nature-centered worldview.

Therefore, the discipline of drawing with pencil and ink, the symbolic nature of my drawings nurtured by my upbringing in a somewhat backhanded way but nurtured all the same, produces this dark aesthetic. My journey in accepting it as my voice to the world has been complicated because I’ve beentold this is what male artists do or “you need to work in color,” which is what female artistst do. Once I stopped listening to these critics, I found my voice and have never looked back.

Warrior of Apathy

WARRIOR OF APATHY is an ink-on-paper drawing of a woman praying, a drawing inspired by being asked to pray for the families of the victims of mass shootings. Her tears and bound hands show her lifetime devotion to prayer, which she sees as her only power. Her power of prayer transcends human solutions to gun violence in America.  Placing the “gun problem” in God’s hands becomes an apathetic ploy for politicians who are paid to keep the gun industry profitable.

This prayer culture is an extension of America’s gun culture. It is the counterweight for the gun industry’s disregard for human life. The gun industry works with preachers and politicians to dehumanize believers into mindless twits who see a world of evil and not a world where human solutions are possible. Their dehumanization of children is the most horrendous—it's not about a person with an AR-15 murdering children; it’s about freedom for the gun owner and his rights. It’s the person, not the guns, as though a gun that shoots multiple rounds a second is the same as a person using a hammer to kill—they’re just evil people, so the religious right preaches. 

We are a country in which corporate greed and simplistic theologies are so interwoven a new Christianity has emerged, one of raw power and brutality. The theology of guns, guts, and God. It’s as though God made an AR-15 and brought it down to earth from heaven, making the gun industry holy and above reproach.

Warrior of Apathy

Wormwood and The Social Construction of Reality

WORMWOOD is a graphite on paper drawing. The face is of an imaginary character from a book by C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters.” The book is a clever way to discuss good and evil. Screwtape is the uncle demon writing letters and words of wisdom to his apprentice nephew about how to keep his “patent” from God, their enemy. In my mind the story continues with Wormwood the former apprentice, now the master; redefining good and evil and what it is in the 21st century—and really what it has always been—the blind spots of ignorance that exist within the reality of the world we construct.

My drawing of Wormwood presents the demon as the consequences to these socially constructed realities. Not everyone has the same social power to negotiate “reality,” creating biases and blank spots in human perceptions of social circumstances and human differences—an example would be how white people have created barriers for black people within our law-making process. Historically, white people have exclusively negotiated our laws with limited to no input from people of color.

Another example is how the Catholic Church’s socially constructed “truths” have huge gapping blind spots for women and people of color. White celibate men do not have the capacity to see the world from anyone perspective other than their own, and their perspective is “God’s perspective,” giving white celibate men unfettered power over the people they rule. Within the Catholic Church women have no social power to construct the theology of good and evil, so, it’s not surprising that women are always the object of the worst sins—for instance why is abortion seemingly the worst sin in the United States of American— because it is solely attributed to women and women have no social power to refute it within the Church. The Church is an iron clad male institution, a place Wormwood securely dwells.

The Landscape of Faces

Southeastern Kentucky

I live in a region of the United States where people are poor financially but rich in the beauty of nature. Unfortunately, the coal and lumber machines have destroyed this beauty for over a century. The wealth leaves the region leaving behind its horrendous footprint on the landscape and the people who remain. The trees and streams are resilient, but the bound people are bitter about the hopes these industries promised. The hopes linger in politicians’ lies and betrayals as darkness finds a life that permeates their perceptions of the future. The dark tattoo is etched on the generations that struggle to find dignity in a society that sees them as hateful and ignorant. There is no open space for them to grow, only the judgments that beat them down. There is no justice for them because their victimhood has no voice. They are genuinely unthought-about because they are the poorest of the poor.

Daily Drawing: Three Crows

Three crows visited my front yard the other day, inspiring a drawing of crows. I haven’t drawn any crows lately, so they came by to remind me, I suppose. Some of my daily drawings take more than a day, especially when I use a lot of value.

Daily Doodle: The Calm before the Storm

The titles I give my drawings emerge after I complete them, usually. “The Calm before the Storm” refers to the aggression we’re seeing in Ukraine and how we will ultimately respond. I can’t help but wonder if WWIII has now started. The situation tells us that peace is the way we must live and that it is an ideology unto itself.

My lines become the solidness between me and falling

defining an image that lives only for me

catching me

stopping me from collapsing into the disquiet

the piece of me

I fight not to be