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FAIR WARNING. This is not even close to my usual light-heartedness.

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

William Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice

If you’ve traveled with me via this website you know that I like to paint pretty things and write quirky observations regarding them. It's not deep or edgy. My stuff generally makes no stronger statement than you'd hear in a conversation between Mr. Rogers and Aunt Bea. This painting veers from that pathway, so I suppose this blog entry might as well be disruptive too.

I am not a biblical scholar or theologian by any means, but experience informs me that Shakespeare was spot on in the admonishment excerpted above from The Merchant of Venice. There is no action or speech so vile that one cannot find a single bible verse to "justify" it. Not in association with the Bible itself, rather by the cold blood sometimes found in the human heart.

So, though I am not a biblical scholar or theologian, I do at least recognize that Romans 13.1 must be read with all of Romans 12 and 13 in order to even begin to place it into the perspective Paul presumably intended. I won’t get into those details here, as scholars, theologians, and clergy have done so eloquently for centuries. They’ve had to - because folks keep insisting on plucking verse 13.1 out of the rest of Paul’s missive to justify genocide, racism and violence. It happened notably in Nazi Germany, under Apartheid, and as part of the U.S. history of slavery and Jim Crow. I cannot speak for intentions, I can only observe that it has been done repeatedly, and there is that commonsense wisdom about what happens to those who forget history.

I had really really really hoped we’d gotten beyond all that. So I was shocked to my core that in 2018 the Attorney General of the United States would in a public speech do exactly what all those slavers and gas chamber jockeys of the past did. He told his minions that Romans 13.1 makes anything the government does okay. Governments and "laws" are not simply peachy keen, they are God-mandated peachy keen. This is not citing scripture for a purpose; it is utilizing scripture as a weapon. 

It is unfathomable to me that the highest legal counsel in the country would have such misguided intentions or downright disrespect for the Constitution, the people, and scripture itself. That he would apply such a long ago discredited biblical interpretation as a tactic. Moreover, it is unacceptable. Something has gotten royally screwed up in this nation if even one person considers this appropriate governance.

The title of this painting is Paul Weeps. I painted it during one furious session. It's quite imperfect. My version of Paul lazily maintains the stereotype that biblical folk all looked like Caucasian hippies. I acknowledge that, in my haste, I painted his tear with an amateurish and very heavy hand. But I wouldn't want to change a thing in this one. I purposefully rendered “Romans 13.1” to look as though it was painted on a wall with blood. I think people who use this verse to justify suffering do just that with the symbolic blood of those they choose to oppress.

I have found it impossible not to add my voice to those who are aghast.

There is an old British nursery rhyme called “This is the House that Jack Built,” written in the whimsical format English professors call a cumulative tale (along the lines of, for example, the 12 Days of Christmas). You say it over and over again, each time adding a new part. What therefore starts as “This is the house that Jack built” becomes “This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built,” after which it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on until, thankfully, you arrive at:

This is the horse and the hound and the horn

That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn

That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn

That woke the priest all shaven and shorn

That married the man all tattered and torn

That kissed the maiden all forlorn

That milked the cow with the crumpled horn

That tossed the dog 

That worried the cat

That killed the rat 

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

None of which has the first darn thing to do with Jack's actual house, not to mention prompting the conclusion that British people are just flat out weird. But you might also appreciate how a child fed a literary diet of this and similar blather can in fact grow up to become a Beatle or member of Monty Python. Since my childhood included many intervals giddily chanting I am Sam – Sam I am – I do not like Green Eggs and Ham, pardon me a moment while I remove all cobble-like objects within a stone's throw of my North American glass house. 

None of which, in turn, has the second darn thing to do with THIS painting. This painting is called The House that Jack Built because (surprise!) it depicts a house that my brother-in-law Jack built. Jack has built many houses for his family over the years; everything from a sort of Hobbit hole buried beneath the earth to Wisconsin’s most spectacular log home to one constructed using insulating concrete forms. This house, between Waukon and Decorah, Iowa, is notable for having a glorious view out of its sunroom and possibly more examples of taxidermy inside than in all of the Museum of Natural History. I painted the view from the sunroom in “Five Deer, Dusting of Snow” (see blog dated February 24, 2018). I probably won’t paint the taxidermy.

This house is special. It just sits there in its perfect setting and prompts a smile. Go visit. Take a fishing pole. Your cell phone will stop working on the way and will only work intermittently enough to infuriate you once you’re there. Maybe that’s the point. You won’t mind because you’ll be happily watching the big open sky and the deer and the (ghosts of ) antelope playing.  

All from the vantage point of the house that Jack built. 

Before I started painting seriously in the early 2000s, I would amuse myself and others with random cartoons and caricatures. Caricaturing is a fascinating and rarely honored sidebar to this so called fine art gig. I enjoy seeing how various editorial cartoonists capture public figures; how ten different versions of a politician are completely different in execution yet each is clearly the person being lampooned. 

I haven't caricatured anybody in well over a decade, but the recent retirement of a thirty year employee offered the opportunity. Some people are easier to get than others, and it took me a lot of crumpled paper to go through the no resemblance phase to the sorta looks like her phase to get to the yep that's her point. After that, for a gag I went with an insurance company commercial parody. I don't sell insurance; rather, Danna, the retiree, certainly knows a thing or two because she's seen a thing or two. I probably shouldn't say that because it's trademarked or copyrighted or whatever but, hey, we caricaturists like to live dangerously.

Anybody who paints develops a barometer to gauge feedback. We can separate the polite praise from the more robust appreciation. With caricaturing this somehow gets amplified. For example, I sent the Danna caricature on a journey throughout the office so people could sign the matting before it got framed. At one point a coworker (I'll call her "Olivia") came striding down the hall to a dramatic stop at my cubicle to announce "THAT is beyond awesome!" I went with coy - "Yeah, hopefully she'll get a good laugh out of it." Olivia impatiently shook her head, waved me off with a none of that hand gesture, burned a laser eye at me so I would get the point, said again "it is BEYOND awesome," then beelined back down the hall because, well, she's a beeliner.

Two further events sealed the deal. First, at the retirement party Danna's mother sought me out to tell me she loved the image of her daughter. The second is that at one point from across the room I saw Danna talking to somebody with the cartoon next to her and actually said out loud "Wow, it really looks like her." The person I had been chit-chatting with gave me a funny look. "Well...Yeah."

I'll leave you to ponder one of life's great mysteries. Why do so many caricaturists, myself included, always fall back on that giant head, small body bobblehead look?