HOPE IN ONE HAND, AND IT’S ENOUGH

Art is defined by hope.

As in, “I hope people like my work.”

Turns out people like Grant Wood’s American Gothic just fine.

They like it so much they mess with it endlessly. Like the image above with the farmer’s daughter holding the phone camera for a selfie.

If her pose doesn’t strike a modern nerve, what else would?

Hope From The Get Go

According to wiki, this was the Iowa house Wood used for his painting.

Artist have an eye for what they’re looking for.

Once he spotted it, he went to work.

I get an Edward Hopper feel from looking at it, but without the desolation.

If Hopper did this scene, it would have been more urban, more bleak.

I checked Wood’s other work to see if he was a Hopper fan.

If they weren’t, they should have been.

Edward Hopper is “a really perfect trade-off” for the local Grant Wood pieces loaned to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, said Kate Kunau, associate curator at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

Both were influenced by Impressionism after studying in Paris, but came home to paint the real world of their native regions.

“Edward Hopper: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York” and a companion exhibition, “Hopper’s World: New York, Cape Cod, and Beyond,” will open Saturday in the first floor galleries at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, continuing through May 20.

The Whitney sent nine paintings and four prints from his early career, 1906 to 1933, with interiors and exteriors, rural and urban settings from his native New England and Paris, playing off the deep shadows and affecting use of light. The companion exhibit draws from the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art’s collection of images and places where Hopper lived and worked, from New York to Cape Cod and Maine, as seen through the eyes of other artists. 

Are you a Hopper fan? If not, check it out. You probably are and didn’t know.

Choose Hope, Even If There’s Not A Choice

If you’ve gone through dark days before this day, you know the drill; if it happened and others were around to see the darkness, you know that drill, too.

I had a touch of darkness in the beginning of 2017, just as Mr. Trump took up residence in the White House.

Medical people called it HPV 16 throat cancer. I called it, “I might be fucked over on this one.”

It was a strange turn of events when I discovered I had the virus while Obama was president, and went through the chemo and radiation marathon with Mr. Trump at the wheel of America.

I started with hope and Obama, who wrote a book about hope. You can buy it from Powell’s here in Portland if you want to skip Amazon.

Obama delivered on hope, and it meant something in my run-up to curing the cancer in my neck.

From goodreads.com:

“Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

But I don’t think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way-in their own lives, at least- to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.

I gritted down and took it. I knew Obama wasn’t a part of the treatment, but for some reason he seemed to give a shit about people, maybe even people like me.

For the record, I wrote him a fan letter for visiting Roseburg, Oregon in 2015 after the shooting at Umpqua Community College.

He didn’t hold a rally and talk about himself; he didn’t conduct a popularity test; he came for the families of the dead, like a real President does.

So I wrote a fan letter, actually a thank-you letter for caring enough to show up. And guess what? I got an official letter back on White House stationary.

We’re Penpals

I took a feeling up uplift into cancer treatment. Strap me onto a table under a radiation gun? Okay. Shoot me up with bags of chemo? Okay.

Mr. Trump had a fan one morning, a man waiting for radiation. He was watching Fox News and started repeating Fox News reports, along with, “Now we’ve got a man in charge, a real man.”

He kept it up until the woman sitting next to me corrected him with, “We had a real man in the White House for the last eight years.”

Which was what the old man was baiting his hook for. He cut loose on the woman with a nasty diatribe of false accusations that nearly turned my stomach. But I wasn’t there looking to argue with a deluded stranger.

He went overboard, crossed the line, and forced her to leave.

That left two of us in the room, and it got ugly. Real ugly. One of us got the uglies, the other was an old man parroting Fox News.

Obama was famous for saying, “When they go low, we go high.”

It was advice I didn’t take. I went low, and kept digging. The son of a bitch verbally abused the driver for another cancer patient, then seemed to congratulate himself after she left.

I asked a few question while we were alone in the room, and he started on me, which was the hook I was baiting.

I felt Obama’s kind words and wondered what he would have said to the nasty old man.

Probably not what I said, which is a segment in my memoir in progress.

It feels like art.