Richard J. Watson

Black art abstract painting w/ collage, mixed media & photograph of Tupac Shakur

1998

"Pearl's World" is a large acrylic painting with a photograph portrait and a number of found objects integrated into the painting, including pearls, metal pins, tickets, and text. Th...

"The Known Soldier" is an acrylic painting with photograph portraits and a number of found objects integrated into the painting including lace, decorative objets, and printed imagery referencing African American history. This painting "collects fragments from the artist's everyday life -- discarded objects found on the streets of Philadelphia that are saved and later repurposed to germinate an idea." Signed by the artist. No need for framing - all hanging hardware included and ready to install on your wall. "Most of my works are supported by memories of the past and suggested realities. Issues of social politics, ancestral references, and astral projections are presented with fragmented elements...

This depicts civil rights icon MLK, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an assemblage of mixed media photographic images and painted collaged elements. A powerful, moving work, an ode to the black civil rights movement. John M. Mitchell is originally from North Carolina, and as an art student at North Carolina Central University, he was involved with the Civil Rights movement including participating and getting arrested at a sit-in protest in Durham in 1963. After graduating, he was one of the first art teachers to take a position at the newly integrated schools in his home state. Mitchell continued his education in the 1990s and earned an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1993. He later served as a professor there from 1998-2006. Of his inspiration to create, Mitchell says: "A lot of my work is based on my experiences during the Civil Rights movement," he says. "I see art making as a 'record' of experiences. My bittersweet past, growing up in the segregated South, inspires the content, focus and narrative of my work." Savannah-based artist John Mitchell believes that a home is more than a simple edifice. Rather, he argues that the sociological, psychological, architectural, and historical associations embedded in the structure “tell us about our culture, our lives. It tells us about where we come from.” Mitchell's signature shotgun house constructions, crafted from found materials and scraps of newspaper headlines, reference his childhood in North Carolina, where such modest architectural structures were once commonplace. In "ALA 1963," he uses the shotgun shape to create a heartfelt memorial to a group of African-American girls killed in a racially motivated church bombing in Alabama nearly 50 years ago. He also incorporates the shotgun symbol in "Victims," a powerful reflection upon crime in Savannah in the early 1990s, which reveals how little has changed over the past two decades. Mitchell's mixed media constructions operate, in many ways, like memory itself. Scraps, fragments and pieces loosely cohere around a central idea, making symbolic and metaphorical connections. In these richly narrative and boldly stream-of-conscious assemblages, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Mitchell's jazz collages - carefully crafted from scraps of newspaper, sheet music, magazines and tissue paper - celebrate key players in Savannah's jazz scene, from sultry female vocalists to wiry male saxophone players. A tribute to the late jazz bassist Ben Tucker, a true Savannah legend, is especially moving, incorporating a pencil sketch of the standing bass player as well as newspaper clippings of other Savannah jazz musicians. Mitchell grew up in a shotgun house in North Carolina, a style of vernacular architecture that is particularly prevalent in the South. Mitchell fills his sculptural homes with objects of metaphorical and symbolic, iconic, importance. In Home Sweet Home he includes the American flag, a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and a china plate depicting The Last Supper, among other items that convey a personal and historical narrative. He notes that making art acts “as a ‘record’ of experiences. My bittersweet past, growing up in the segregated South, inspires the content, focus, and narrative of my work.” While this contains elements reminiscent of folk art and outsider art this is a quite sophisticated tour de force. He was included in the show Complex Uncertainties, Telfair Museum: Modern and contemporary art comprise painting, prints, drawing, photograph, sculpture, and works in new media, representing American artistic achievement from 1945 to the present day. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Bruce Davidson, Elaine de Kooning, Carrie Mae Weems, Sam Gilliam, Ethel Schwabacher, Radcliffe Bailey...

Colorful and dynamic abstract composition by Ross H. Pollette, who also paints under the pseudonyms 'Max West' (American, b. 1948). Pollette has used oil, in...