MARCH 2025 Newsletter

‘THE FIGHT WITH JAMIE JESSUP’ oil on canvas 28 x 24 in. by Henry Vermillion

A PAINTER’S NOTEBOOK #9

By Henry Vermillion

Four years ago, when I quit doing theater and other such interesting things to become a full-time painter, I thought it would be easy.

Not so simple.

Life now is indeed better. But in some important ways, it´s much more difficult. By making things simpler, life has become more complicated. Now I have no excuses for not tackling some painting problems I’ve always avoided, both in subject matter and in style.

Recently, in a bar, a woman from Kentucky exclaimed “You’re a painter? How wonderful! You can spend all your time painting beautiful things!” She was clearly puzzled and a little bit shocked when I explained that I often painted political and social satires rather than beautiful pictures, and that it was sometimes very tough to translate some of the ideas which are important to me into visual images. The lady changed the subject to real estate.

The canvas I´m currently finishing up, for example, pictures a dirt country road angling down from top right to bottom left. A plain wooden country house is on the lower left side of the road, and a similar house is in the distance on the upper right side of the road. Pasture land is on either side of the dirt road. The true subjects of the painting are the group of boys gathered at the bottom of the dusty road. Two of the boys are fighting; the others are watching. (Unseen, about 30 feet below the bottom of the canvas, the road crosses a wooden bridge over the Leon River. The river is only a shallow creek that time of the year, but still shelters sunfish and catfish. One of the two boys fighting was returning home after a summer´s day of fishing when he was taunted and challenged by the leader of the other boys, so the fight began.

No, I didn´t invent any of this. I was the kid returning from fishing, and Jamie Jessup was the challenger. Jamie was not a bad kid, but he was the better natural athlete, and was more muscular than the rest of us boys in the seventh grade. Compact and dark haired, he was the adopted son of one or our scoutmasters. His dad said he was dark because he was part Indian.

The fight was mostly a wrestling bout, like most boys’ fights in those days, but it was tense, it was most serious, and it lasted a long time, back and forth, up and down on the dirt road, and in mostly scuffling sweat and silence. In the end, it was a physical draw, no clear winner, but most important---it was a victory for me, because Jamie quit fighting first. He quit saying something like “Sure I could beat him, but it´s not worth my time.” His buddies and I both knew better.

The painting has no bravura brushwork, the painting style is very traditional, to suit the time and place.

A lot of my past was as not as well resolved as this incident, and I plan to make more pictures from the past, to help resolve some unresolved matters.

‘DIEGO RIVERA’ watercolor 12 x 18 in. by Henry Vermillion

‘ALI TUESDAY NIGHT 3.11’ Life Drawing Sessions at Henry Vermillion´s

‘TUESDAY NIGHT DRAWING 3.25’ Three 2 minute poses, charcoal pencil by Henry Vermillion.

‘TUESDAY NIGHT 3.25 STANDING MALE NUDE’ charcoal pencil by Henry Vermillion.

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February 2025 Newsletter

“KAFKA, KITAJ, AND JOE SINGER” 30 X 40 / oil and charcoal / by Henry Vermillion

A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

By Henry Vermillion

I´ve just completed a canvas called “Kafka, Kitaj, and Joe Singer”. And rather than have folks take a glance, think “Pretty strange” before moving along, I’m going to first explain how the painting came about.

First, it´s painted over a 30” X 40” canvas which was covered by a painted sketch of my wife, which neither of us much liked (she hated it). Second---I´ve long been an admirer of the American-born painter R.B. Kitaj, who trained and spent most of his career in London. He was one of those painters who was widely read in art history, poetry, and esthetics, and was an admirer of the Czech writer Franz Kafka. (He also worked two years as a merchant marine seaman and served in the U.S. military. The charcoal profile in the upper right corner of the picture is Kitaj.) Third---Joe Singer was a friend of Kitaj´s mother when the artist was a child. A Jew, Kitaj (years later) painted Joe in a safe underground refuge. The distorted female face mid-right and the wild-haired face in mid-picture are all quotes from Kitaj paintings or pastel drawings.

The two people in the upper left are Kafka´s mother and father. The mother appears again in the upper right. One of Kafka´s best-known writings is an eloquent letter to his father, a domineering and oppressive businessman. In it, Kafka tells his father that he has always been afraid of him and that he felt himself a failure because of those fears. (The letter was never delivered.)

Lastly, the “Why” of the picture. For a good while, I´ve felt that I need to aim a little higher in my work; need to risk a little more. I myself grew up a word family: my father was a newspaperman and public relations writer. At university, I studied literature and science, not art, so it was natural that I was drawn to Kitaj´s work, full of literary references as it is-- visual dreams, eroticism, politics, strange colors in odd combinations. He was a fine draftsman---his sure line could capture anything. He was admired by and influenced David Hockney and many others of that generation.

And—I´ve said it before, but I´ll repeat it: being the famous tourist and expatriate town that it is, San Miguel art is naturally oriented toward the tourist/expatriate trade. Not much work with ideas, or things to think about. Not much close looking. But, why not?

“KAFKA, KITAJ, AND JOE SINGER” Underpainting. This is the painting painted over resulting in the one titled. / 30 x 40 in. / canvas, oil and charcoal by Henry Vermillion

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January 2025 Newsletter

GAZA, WAR, AND ART Oil 34.5 x 36 inches Completed Painting by Henry Vermillion

GAZA, WAR, AND ART

By Henry Vermillion

What should we think? What should we make of the war in Gaza? I´m just finishing a painting which shows twelve or fourteen Gazans, young and old, crowded behind flimsy wooden fencing. They´re waiting for food and water. I would say it´s a very mild version of an anti-war picture; I think of Goya´s “Disasters of War”, of course. These etchings show the battlefields of the French-Spanish war of the time, pretty much as it was: women being raped, chopped-off arms and legs strung up from blasted tree limbs, and other similar atrocities and daily happenings on the battlefields.

Most of us can agree that the Gaza war is in fact a tragedy, a terrible thing, as all wars are. Many, or perhaps most, including the toothless United Nations, have repeatedly called for a cease-fire and a beginning of talks aimed at the creation of a two-state solution, but a recent survey showed that over 60% of Israelis believe that God ordained that all of Palestine belongs to the Jews, so that´s that. Benjamin Netanyahu seems solidly in that group. God—whichever brand of God one believes in---does work in mysterious ways. Or, better said, we humans have invented various tribal gods who suit our tribe (on the whole) fine, but who are hell on most other gods, their cousins.

When Goya began making the “Disasters of War” ---some 85 of them—he showed Spanish soldiers to advantage---less brutal than the French---but in the later ones, all were equally brutal, all equally victims. War itself was the disaster. The series was not printed and circulated until many years after Goya’s death.

Maybe next time around, I´ll try for a more graphic illustration myself.

P.S. As this newsletter is going out, a truce/ceasefire has been signed:

Ojala, may it endure!