Today’s Paffooney is an oil painting I did in the 1980’s. It is an attempt to prove to myself that I could paint realistically enough to call myself a surrealist. I know you may think that last sentence is a mix of oxymoron and just plain moron, but it is necessary to have the REAL in place in the middle of the surrealism. I chose to make it from photographs. I used a picture of myself and David (a child who was my student, but taught me more than I taught him) with another photo of a building that my grandparents had taken a vacation picture in front of from Tombstone, Arizona. It was important to get the light right. I wanted to establish a dramatic light source in the upper right of the picture and bathe the scene in sunlight.
As a self portrait this works because it shows a lot of what I am as a teacher. I willingly wear the black hat. I am a cowboy. I shoot from the hip, in the sense that I actually teach stuff that’s in the literature book instead of doing test-preparation worksheets. I teach because I actually care about kids, not because I’m greedy for the fantastic salary they offer to Texas teachers, especially one that is willing to teach in a poor rural community where most of the kids are Hispanic, under-fed, and under-loved by the people who run this lovely business-friendly State.
The boy in the picture is one who didn’t have a father living at home, whose mother was always working, and who never got a break from the social workers, police, and other school personnel. I had a very progressive and wonderful principal at the time who knew I’d studied to be a foster parent in case of need and knew that other boys had been successfully mentored by me. He suggested I keep an eye on David and help him out when no one else could. It was David who taught me that if you feed a child like him (I was a lousy cook but I could make hamburgers and mashed potatoes) they will continually show up at your door like a stray cat. I was single at the time. It was a bit risky to let a child into my home where people might think I was some kind of child-molester. But I kept the apartment windows open, hid nothing from anybody, helped him with homework (if I could get him to do any), and played computer games and role-playing games with him. I took him to the doctor a couple of times. I listened when he needed to talk about things, and he was my friend until he graduated high school. Now he is married with children of his own. I haven’t seen him in over sixteen years, but I know that skinny little mosquito-sized boy has grown into a big healthy, well-fed man. It is important in life, and in oil paintings, to make a difference for someone else. He made a difference for me. Notice how he uses his rabbit-ear fingers to keep me humble in my self-portrait.
As a composition, even though this is a realistic picture, it works because of numerous rectangles that stack and pile and lead the eye into the depths of the background while the strong diagonals made by shadows, arms, and edges not only draw you to the center of the picture, but bring the figure of the boy and I closer together than we are in the actual image. Layers of reality, carefully composed, to capture and portray… That last sentence is a three line poem to explain what an oil painting really is… or maybe what it SURreally is.
Catch a Falling Star 