Visual Thinking and Occasional Odds and Ends

If the picture above does not make you cringe then perhaps you are Jon McNaughton's audience.   But to this trained painter, the image looks like the worst of American realism.  It is not realistic at all.  There is no sea on earth that looks like this.  The image fits into what might be called the School of Thomas Kinkade - so trite as to be embarrassing.   I love realistic paintings.  The western tradition of realism is what I learned and is at the heart and soul of what I still attempt when I do paint.  The following is a Maine seascape by Winslow Homer, who, unlike this son of Utah, really knew the sea.  If you cannot see the difference in quality of presentation, then (again) you are probably Jon's audience.   Oh - no I won't try to tell you why one is good and the other is not.  That is not how you do it.  If I was with you, I might point my finger at a specific area in Homer's work and discuss it compared to ...

The picture at the top is from a Christmas Party in 1946 in an auto dealership in Paterson NJ where my father was the general manager.   I am showing it for a reason that will be clear by the end.   Conservatives make frequent reference to the founders but if you look closely, you will learn that they do so only when it suits them.  They pretend that the founders were a united group of men who had a single idea about how the US should be governed and about what our constitution meant, but the founders were far from being a single group with shared beliefs.  For example, the Massachusetts founders believed that government was an instrument for promoting progress.  The Virginia founders on the other hand were well to do planters, also slaveholders and who wanted rights for themselves (the ruling planter class) but who had not the least concern for the “servants” who worked for them, nor for the poor whites who lived in squalor in the hills and woods....