When: Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:00pm
Where: 5 Holden St., North Adams, MA 01247-2423
What: A LAPATA SHOW!

Three Generations of Rockwell Creators:

For the first time ever, the artwork of three generations of Rockwells will be displayed in the Berkshires, as the work of Jarvis and Daisy Rockwell is exhibited in North Adams as part of DownStreet Art, a public art project of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center.
Their work will join the art of their father and grandfather, 20th-century American painter and Illustrator Norman Rockwell, which can be viewed at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.
From June 24 to July 25, Daisy Rockwell’s “Rasgulla,” a display of Rasa paintings, will be in the Galerie Inqilab at 5 Holden St.

I really, really, really wish I was there. Please attend in my stead and see Lapata’s latest show.

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A Happy Eid (and xmas, hannukah, kwanzaa, festivus) to all CM readers – may your bakras look better than Fidel.

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A manly public image can take a lot of work. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s image is managed on many levels, including media depiction of his relationships with household pets. It has been widely reported that Putin is frequently photographed with an imposing black lab named Koni, whom he even invites to summits with foreign leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is known to be afraid of dogs due to some childhood trauma. But Putin’s heart does not lie with his muscular labrador as he would like us to believe. On the contrary, he harbors a secret love for a fluffy little poodle named Tosya. Tosya, whose fur is weekly trimmed ‘in the lion’s style’ by a dog hairdresser, is officially supposed to be his wife, Lyudmila’s pet, but this photo, uncovered by the resourceful Scottish Terrier and Dog News, tells a different story.

The White House maintains a special website for Barney.
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When President of South Korea visited with Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, they toasted their pact with blueberry wine and Kim played the eccentric and charismatic host, as is his wont. President Roh presented the Commander with many gifts, including the DVDs of “YMCA Baseball Team, Strokes of Fire, and the hit drama Daejanggeum (대장금), which features Lee Young-ae (이영애), known as one of Kim’s favorite South Korean actresses.” President Roh added that “The stories are good but the qualities of the pictures are just as good. These days, there are a lot of movies that gather a lot of attention with good visuals.”

Thoughts on the Pekingese by Empress Dowager Cixi:

Let the Lion Dog be small; let it wear the swelling cape of dignity around its neck; let it display the billowing standard of pomp above its back.

Let its face be black; let its forefront be shaggy; let its forehead be straight and low.

Let its eyes be large and luminous; let its ears be set like the sails of war junk; let its nose be like that of the monkey god of the Hindus.

Let its forelegs be bent; so that it shall not desire to wander far, or leave the Imperial precincts.

Let its body be shaped like that of a hunting lion spying for its prey.

Let its feet be tufted with plentiful hair that its footfall may be soundless and for its standard of pomp let it rival the whick of the Tibetans’ yak, which is flourished to protect the imperial litter from flying insects.

Let it be lively that it may afford entertainment by its gambols; let it be timid that it may not involve itself in danger; let it be domestic in its habits that it may live in amity with the other beasts, fishes or birds that find protection in the Imperial Palace.

And for its colour, let it be that of the lion – a golden sable, to be carried in the sleeve of a yellow robe; or the colour of a red bear, or a black and white bear, or striped like a dragon, so that there may be dogs appropriate to every costume in the Imperial wardrobe.

Let it venerate its ancestors and deposit offerings in the canine cemetery of the Forbidden City on each new moon.

Let it comport itself with dignity; let it learn to bite the foreign devils instantly.

Let it be dainty in its food so that it shall be known as an Imperial dog by its fastidiousness; sharks fins and curlew livers and the beasts of quails, on these may it be fed; and for drink give it the tea that is brewed from the spring buds of the shrub that groweth in the province of Hankow, or the milk of the antelopes that pasture in the Imperial parks.

Thus shall it preserve its integrity and self-respect; and for the day of sickness let it be anointed with the clarified fat of the legs of a sacred leopard, and give it to drink a throstle’s eggshell full of the juice of the custard apple in which has been dissolved three pinches of shredded rhinoceros horn, and apply it to piebald leeches.

So shall it remain – but if it dies, remember thou too art mortal.

The moral of this tale, my friends, is never use an acrylic-based varnish with watercolors. Is it any mistake it happened to the First Family? Could this be inadvertent acrylic voodoo?

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As you can see, I am a magnificent horse. Proof of my magnificence lies in the fact that I was presented as a special gift to First Lady of the United States Jacqueline Kennedy by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1962. During the First Lady’s resplendent tour of South Asia, she was presented with many fine gifts, including me (Sardar), an elephant named Urvashi (presented by the Nehrus), and two baby Bengal tigers (presented by Air India) whom the First Lady had planned to name Kitty and Ken after Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife. I say she had planned to name them Kitty and Ken because they perished before they could be shipped to the United States from India. Clearly I was the most suitable gift of these as the First Lady was an equestrienne nonpareil and I was successfully brought to the state of Virginia in the United States so that Mrs. Kennedy might enjoy my company as much as possible.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “You say you are magnificent, but you are only half a horse! Where is the other half of your body?” This is an excellent question. As it happens, I am actually a painting of a horse, representing a particular horse, named Sardar, that existed in history. My photograph was taken in Virginia in the company of the First Lady and Field Marshal Khan, and an artist has rendered that scene in a triptych. During the course of this rendering, the artist has made certain stylistic decisions, causing me to be only half a horse in her painting, though I remain a full horse in the original photograph. This decision was no doubt made because, in the style of miniaturists of old, she did not wish to make the animal larger than the two great human leaders also present in her painting, yet, bound by the duties of a perspectival painter in the Frankish mold, she was not able to bring herself to make me a very small horse in proportion to the First Lady and the Field Marshal. Thus, I have become half a large horse.

As befits any momentous event in human history, as well as those timeless tales of old that perhaps once took place in the ordinary lives of every day men and women, such as the story of Leila and Majnun or that of the travails of Princess Diana, the wondrous tour of South Asia undertaken by Mrs. Kennedy, or Jackie O, as she is also known, has been documented on many pages and even upon the medium of celluloid. As it happens, another artist, one from the country of France, accompanied Mrs. Kennedy on this tour, and created many intricate paintings depicting many thrilling events during that time, but neglected to capture the apotheosis of the journey, the gifting of a horse (me) to Jackie O. Those paintings by the French lady are collected in a small volume called Mrs. Kennedy Goes Abroad that includes an introduction by former Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, for whom a Bengal Tiger cub was nearly named until it met with an untimely demise, being a less suitable ornament to the First Lady’s person. As Mr. Galbraith recounts:

My wife Kitty and I planned Jacqueline Kennedy’s trip to India. We resisted a proposal that she visit the ancient temple of Konarak, where her viewing of the explicitly erotic statuary would have greatly attracted the media instinct which later was so rejoiced by Bill Clinton. We were her hostess and host until Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the most distinguished statesmen of his age, snatched her away. The American embassy residence in new Delhi was then under construction; our dwelling was too small so we had requisitioned nearby accommodations. Nehru held them to be inadequate and moved Jackie and her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill, to rooms in his own house. This was not a simple act of grace: Meeting her at the plane and seeing her later, he was enormously attracted and wanted to see more of her, which as the visit passed he did.

For many chroniclers, it was Mrs. Kennedy’s wardrobe that caused the most excitement. The ne plus ultra of the trip was for many that little pink dress she wore in Udaipur. In an article on her fashions during the trip, a reporter from Life magazine recounts many interesting tidbits:

At the start of her journey to India, Jacqueline Kennedy expressed the hope that her trip would not turn into a fashion show. But despite her best efforts, her every seam has been the subject of hypnotized attention from the streets of Delhi to Khyber Pass. By the time she reached Pakistan, an official release was describing her as “the best-dressed woman in the world.” whether or not she was wearing a hat or a hair bow or a belt took on international importance. An Indian lady correspondent timidly asked, “Would it be impolite to mention in my story that she is not wearing stockings?”

The most dogged of the clothes-watchers in her press entourage have now counted 22 different costumes as of the end of her stay in Lahore. She has worn only two things a second time. The rare “repeats” are greeted with the joy of a bird watcher spotting a prothonotary warbler.

….

Among the statisticians of the trip there are even counters of shoes, one school holding that she wears the same pale cream ones and has them cleaned, and the other holding she throws them away like Kleenex.

Surprisingly, although one may well imagine bearers staggering under a load of 16 trunks, Mrs. Kennedy actually travels with two large footlockers plus six assorted smaller suitcases. Her principal secret weapon is her maid, Mrs. Providencia Paredes, who is always so discreet that she is nearly invisible– so much so, in fact, that the Kennedys almost left Vienna last spring without her. Mrs. Paredes carries a steam iron wherever she goes and wields it with extraordinary skill.

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The utmost discretion has been observed about the Kennedy coiffure.
Throughout the safari, as the rest of the females in her party grew gradually rumpled, then wilted and finally vanished in a pool of butter like the tigers in Little Black Sambo, Mrs. Kennedy’s flowing tresses survived an overnight train ride, two boat rides and two weeks of one-night stands. Through all this her hair looked precisely as it had the day she left. This is obviously impossible without aid; the finger of suspicion in this delicate subject points to Mrs. William Laton of New York City, listed in the party as Princess Radziwill’s maid and secretary. There is speculation that Mrs. Laton keeps a hair dryer in her typewriter case.

The most impressive part of Mrs. Kennedy’s dress, however, was the visual impact of the colors she chose for each occasion. A French artist who is a member of our troupe remarked, “She must have studied terribly carefully. Every dress she wears becomes a marvelous spot of color, like the bright spot that holds your eye in Persian miniatures. The pale apricot silk she wore for the boat ride on Pichola Lake was wonderful against these pink-tinged castles in the water.”

….

One of the most noticeable side effects of Mrs. Kennedy’s wardrobe has been its influence on the traditionally dowdy female press corps. Two lady reporters are now carrying, in addition to typewriters, hatboxes, containing wigs, and three take notes while wearing little white gloves.

Personally, as a familiar of Mrs. Kennedy, I must say that it is not the penchant for haute couture which makes the lady, but her exquisite manners and charming personality. As you can see from the paintings recently completed by the artist who has rendered my half-portrait, the First Lady was a sparkling conversationalist and was able to put her interlocutors at ease, whether they be a military dictator, a prime minister, her sister, or a horse, such as myself.

It has been all-petition-all-the-time at CM lately. Which is a marked contrast to my usual unflappably complacent demeanor but, if the shit really start to stink, one must light the fire [my grandfather used to say that and it sounds way better in Punjabi. Also, it makes more sense since cow-dung is used as fuel, but I am getting off the topic here...].

Anyhow, it has been a while since I promised some word of William Moorcroft – one of the adventurers in India who went ‘native’ – not in the White Mughal way rather in the White Ibn Batutta way. I came across Moorcroft while reading the memoirs of Alexander Burnes (1805–1841) who famously charted the waters of Indus for the East India Company in 1830. In his travelogue, Burnes describes reaching Qandahar and finding the remaining possessions of the dead and buried William Moorcroft [by then a rather legendary and contentious figure in John Company's imagination]. Reading over the catalogue of Moorcroft’s possessions – a unique blend of botanical, medicinal, veternarian, and litrary works – I decided to pursue the thread of this amazing life, for just one moment, and in that pursuit came across other indelible characters – like Captain Hyder Young Hearsey.

William Moorcroft (bap. 1767, d. 1825), actually made horseshoes, ran stables, bred horses and taught at the Veterinary College in London. He was the first Englishman with a complete formal veterinary education. His classics, The Horse Medicine Chest (1795) and Methods of Shoeing Horses (1800) made him a good candidate as a manager for East India Company’s stud farm in Bengal. And in 1807, he took their offer and set sail for India.

EIC at the turn of the 19th century needed war horses – cavalry being the troops that would protect the reign of the Company from the Sea to Sutlej. He joined the horse farm at Pusa with the intention of purchasing and breeding horses for the EIC. However, he quickly decided that he was not going to find big, sturdy war horses in Bengal – and so, thought to seek the legendary birthplace of the horses in the Himalayan peaks [He also sought "materials of the finest woolen fabric"]. But, first, he needed a guide.

Captain Hyder Young Hearsey (1782 – 1840) was the son of English Captain Harry Hearsey, serving with the Marathas, and an Indian mother. He was sent to England for his education to return to India at the age of 16. He became a cavalry captain in the army of one of the Maratha leaders, Daulatrao Sindhia, and later an officer under George Thomas, another adventurer with a small kingdom centered around Hansi. By the age of 21, Hearsey had himself carved out a small principality in Mewat; married Zuhur al-Nissa, a princess from Cambay; and settled down with an army of five thousand at his command. At the breaking of the second English-Maratha War in 1803, Hearsey decided to join the King’s army.

Hearsey was already an explorer by the time he met Moorcroft. Along with Captain Webb and Lt. Raper, he had tried to survey the Ganges from Hardwar to Gangotri in 1808. So, when in 1812, Moorcroft decided to travel, under disguise, across the Himalayas and into Western Tibet, he called upon his friend Hearsey to accompany him. Hearsey brought along with him a long-time companion, Ghulam Hyder Khan, and some fifty native coolies and carriers. There were also two pundit surveyors – one of whom, Harkh Dev, is said to have kept pace for the entire trek (“two of his ordinary steps measuring exactly four feet”). Dressed as native pilgrims [Moorcroft's disguise almost busted when he was found wearing 'half boots of an English pattern'], they argued, cajoled and gifted their way through Gurkha and Tibetan territories to Lake Manasarovar. It was here that Moorcroft discovered that Russian trading caravans had long visited the region [setting off Moorcroft's involvement in the Great Game].

After their return, Moorcroft and Hearsey parted ways. Hearsey continued on in his service to the Company – fighting in the Gurkha wars. Moorcroft went back to managing the EIC stable but found the conditions deteriorating. The demands for war-horses continued to escalate while the supplies continued to deteriorate. He kept asking EIC permission to travel to Bukhara to find better horses, trade routes and gather intelligences. He was finally granted that permission, begrudgingly, in 1819. In the meantime, he had married Purree Khanum, and had had two children. Leaving them behind, Moorcroft took a native staff of around fifty, reportedly 8 tons of luggage, and set off on a legendary journey that would take him over 1500 miles – across Afghanistan, Ladakh, Turkistan and Bukhara. He wrote back to the EIC copious volumes filled with observations botanical, political, cultural, religious; suspicions and theories about Russians behind every rock, but rarely anything about horses.

When he finally reached Bukhara in February 1825, the first time any Company traveller had entered that kingdom, he did not find many horses to purchase. By this time, EIC had grown exceedingly weary of his travels, his expenses and his immaculate diagrams of flora and fauna. Declaring that he had failed his mission, they demanded an immediate return. However, Moorcroft only made it back as far as the gates of Balkh, by Amu Darya, where he died of a fever, on 27 August 1825. His caravan and the survivors straggled home, on their own.

Burnes listed the books he found in Moorcroft’s possession. It is a remarkable list, not only for the breadth of topics but also in the snapshot it offers of knowledges necessitated by the imperial enterprise in early 19th century India – knowledge of languages, religions, and sciences are inextricably mixed in the persona of one William Moorcroft gathering intelligence and supplies to keep afloat the colonial machinery of the Company. The manuscripts and books:

Gladwin’s Materia Medica in the Arabic and Persian Languages with English Translations, Gladwin’s Persian Moonshee, Elphinstone’s Cabool, Malcolm’s History of Persia, Berchtold’s Essay for Patriotic Travellers, Hunter’s Hindoostanee Dictionary, an Essay on Vaccination, a Pamphlet on Trade with India and China, Bedingfield on Diseases, Murray’s Chemistry, Saumarez’s Physiology, Nautical Alamanack for 1823, Bell on the Urethra, Fry’s Pautographia, Herau on War, Duncan’s Edinburgh Dispensatory, Marco Polo’s Travels, The New Testament in Toorkee [!], Hey’s Surgery, Reece’s Medical Guide, Maladies Chirurgicales, Hamilton’s East India Gazetteer, Scarpa on the Eye, Saunders on the Eye, Fordyce on Fevers, Hutton’s Mathematics, Histoire des Desconvertes, Cullen’s Practise of Physic, Art of Cookery.

The recent historiography of British in India has done little to highlight the lives of men like Perron, Thomas, Hearsey, and Moorcroft – all Outsiders in the Company’s narrative – even as the following generation of adventurers like Burnes, Outram, and Burton hogged the literary limelight of late nineteenth century England with their memoirs, translations and travelogues.

I don’t want to turn this post into a boring academic discursive on postcolonial scholarship, so I will abruptly stop and ask you to remember this piece of bar trivia: William Moorcroft sent Tibetan sheep to Regent’s Park.

In 1957, Francis S. Chase, the founding Dean of the Graduate School of Education, established at the University of Chicago the “Pakistan Education Project” with support from the Ford Foundation. The purpose of the project was to improve education through teacher-training programs at extension centers in what was then East and West Pakistan and to improve facilities for students at those university campuses.

The program led to the establishment of 43 pilot secondary schools and new educational centers were organized at the University of Dhaka and Punjab University. More than 5,000 teachers and administrators were trained in the Pakistan Education Project with many Pakistani teachers coming to Chicago for their training.

From 1963 – 1973, this project was directed by Kenneth Rehage, who travelled extensively to Pakistan. He also directed the University’s Peace Corps Training Program for Pakistan in 1963.

Kenneth Rehage, Professor Emeritus in Education and a celebrated teacher, passed away this January. He was 96.

I will try and find out more about the Pakistan Education Project. Not many details are available online – though, a dissertation was written on it in 1962 by Alan Peshkin. But I will note this: In a report Kenneth Rehage wrote for the Elementary School Journal in 1958, I was struck by these words: “The influence of Sputnik was keenly felt at this conference.” The conference was on the future of high school education in America and Pakistan. Think about it.

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Background: A few months ago I wrote about artistic depictions of Usama bin Laden. I posted a painting of my own and the works of three well-known artists, Werner Horvath (Austria), Sokari Camp-Douglas (Nigeria/UK) and Hassan Musa (Sudan/UK), as well as one (or more?) Bengali folk artists. Recently Werner Horvath came across that post and left some comments. I followed the link to his website and was fascinated by his Virtual Museum of Totalitarian Art. Subsequently I got in touch with him and asked him for an e-nterview. Q & A, posted below.

Lapata: Tell me about your collection of totalitarian art, which is fantastic. Do you personally own all of these paintings? If so, is there a non-virtual exhibit of them, or do you keep them in your home? What made you start collecting this kind of art, and when did you start?

Werner Horvath: Approximately 15 years ago I visited the art museums of Paris, France. I was so fascinated by the art displayed there, that I decided to become an art collector as well (a painter I have been all my life, even during my 25 years in the medical profession). But what kind of art should I collect? Well, counting my money, I knew I could either “collect” one single painting of a famous artist (at least a small one), or I had to find another way. At the same time I saw paintings in the style of Soviet Socialist Realism in Austria. Nobody liked them; therefore they were cheap. And when I looked at the paintings more closely, not through the lens of the propaganda of that system, I began to understand their beauty. For example look at these two paintings done by the artist Vladimirski: “Roses for Stalin” and “Black Ravens”. They show the two sides of the soul of Vladimirski. In creating the Stalin picture, he was a propaganda artist, perfect in technique, but totally keeping within the system. But how the work “Black Ravens” could pass censorship, is still unknown: the “Black Ravens” were the cars used by the KGB to arrest civilians, often in the wee hours in the morning. They were notorious in creating an atmosphere of fear. Fascinating these two sides of an artist being part of a repressive system, isn’t it?

I became hypnotized with these artworks, I had the opportunity to buy a lot of them before interest in Socialist Realism developed very rapidly, and before there was the insatiable demand for such of art as there is today.

When these paintings grew too expensive, I had to change to another kind of art, and I was lucky again. A friend of mine, Prof. Prinz, head of the ethnomedicine-department of Vienna’s university, showed African art to me. Since that moment I’ve been collecting political paintings of the Congo. I get them directly from the artists, and the paintings fit very well into my collection of political art. You can see them here.

But until now I have only displayed my collection in a virtual way, via the internet, except the paintings created by myself, which are very frequently presented in “real” exhibitions.

Lapata: Tell me about the Saddam Hussein paintings in your collection. Where did you find them? Also, explain the ‘mystery’ of the seal. Do you think it is the artist’s signature? Or perhaps a mark of ownership?

WH: The story of the Saddam paintings is a very short one. When American soldiers invaded Iraq, photos of political art depicting Saddam could be seen in the newspapers. Most of them displayed Saddam as a powerful man, and most of them were destroyed. I wanted to get some for my collection of political art and did a search via newspapers and the internet. In the end, I did not get any of the paintings I wanted, although the former chief of the Baghdad art museum is living in Austria now, and he was one of the artists who had created these pictures. The only paintings I could purchase were the ones you can see here and they are not typical. I got them shipped from Amman, Jordan, but the guy who sold them did not know anything about the painter. Not even if he was from the Iraq. And the third picture, I got from there (Qaddafi) has the same seal as we found on the two Saddam paintings. I do not know if the seal is the sign of the painter, the owner or a museum or something else. And I do not even know if these paintings are worth anything…

Lapata: Tell me about your choice of subject? Do you pick whatever seems important to you, or do things just strike you as interesting?

WH: The process of creating my own work is the following: I take a photo from a newspaper, a magazine or from the internet; I prefer an iconic image because it will be better recognized by people later. I do sketches using colored pencils, but only using 4 to 6 of different degrees of darkness, similiar to greyscales. When the sketch is good enough I transfer it by hand to canvas, marking the borders of one color to another, sometimes using a grid. Then I paint the first layer with acrylic colors, always keeping the same greyscale I used in the sketch, but dividing the segments into smaller shapes and different colors. The most important process is the last one: I overpaint the whole picture with oil colors, creating the shadows to make it more three-dimensional. In this photograph, you can see the process I used to create my version of the Mona Lisa.

Lapata: You describe yourself as a Neo-Constructivist. Can you talk a little about Neo-Constructivism? Is this a philosophy that interested you outside of painting?

WH: The term “New Constructivism” is taken from a philosophical theory and based on the works of Vico, Uexküll, Glasersfeld and Watzlawick, to name a few. The theoretical background is explained in detail in a stage play in form of a text-collage, called Jahrtausendwende – Die Theorie des neuen bildenden Konstruktivismus (in German). I try to show in my paintings that the reality we rely on is not so real at all. The world that we live in is understood only as we construct it ourselves. For example, colours only exist in our consciousness, therefore are not “real”. The same is true for objects and relationships.

Lapata: I see from your bio that you are/were a radiologist and that you have participated in many conferences for doctors who are also artists. Are there many doctor/artists? Do you feel like your medical training has influenced your art at all, or the other way round? Or do you feel like they are two separate worlds that are difficult to reconcile?

WH: I can only talk for Austria: Approximately 100 medical doctors are working as artists in this country of 7-8 million inhabitants. That is not very many people. 60 of them have joined the “Austrian Medical Art Club“.
I personally decided to leave the medical profession at the age of 50 and have been working as a freelance artist ever since. I opened a studio called “Villa Arte” in Kastellos on the island of Crete (Greece) in 2003 and also my “Atelier Horvath” in Linz, Austria, where I work during the winter.

Lapata: Tell me about your two ateliers in Austria and Greece. It is not common in the US for an artist to have the equivalent to an atelier. What is the function of the atelier? Is it a gallery? Do other artists show their work there, or do work there? Are these ateliers open to the public?

WH: My atelier in Linz, Austria, is a kind of gallery. Friends and customers come to see my latest creations, and some of them can make their decisions about which artwork to buy. But during the last year the function of my atelier has changed a little bit: Linz will be official European Cultural Capital in 2009, and a group of artists is preparing projects here or this reason. Therefore we meet in my atelier; it is small enough to come together, and it is big enough to offer extra space for talking one on one. I hope from the bottom of my heart that we will be good enough. The studio in Crete is different. It is far South: that means sun, heat, no rain, also a little bit loneliness; and it is an open house for artists and art lovers to relax, sit together, eat and drink, swim in the sea and walk in the mountains…but also to work. Of course there are exhibitions held there too, but not for so many people, only for friends and neighbours to see what the “wicked artists” have been up to for the last three weeks. It is not a place to sell paintings, but it is a place to create a lot of them. I am there for the whole summer. I go there wearing gray winter in my heart, with all my sorrows, my depression. And I always come back to Austria renewed, because I have found colors again.

…so I went ahead and made a picture of him. Well, three, actually. Here they all are together, as per sepoy’s request (below), in a PPP flag triptych. To see them individually, up close and personal, here’s red, black and green.

I painted this portrait of Mullah Omar a few months ago, probably around the 9/11 anniversary hooplah. One doesn’t hear much about this guy anymore, even though it’s possible that he’s leading quite an active life. Since he has barely ever been photographed, he’s not the sort of person that absolutely everyone would recognize, like UbL, but it still seems likely that he would cut quite a figure wherever he is and whatever he is doing (unless he’s dead). Not allowing one’s self to be photographed can have all sorts of interesting possibilities for changing one’s occupation and lifestyle. A few years ago, an Afghan taxi driver told me that in fact Mullah Omar is still active in the Afghan government, under the pseudonym of Hamid Karzai. Aside from the fact that Hamid Karzai has allowed himself to be photographed throughout his life, and is much older than Mullah Omar, the theory is intriguing. There are a few pictures claiming to represent Mullah Omar floating around the internet though, most of which don’t look like they were taken of the same person. The picture I chose as a basis for this portrait made him look one-eyed, so it seemed the most likely to be authentic, though it doesn’t make him look much like Hamid Karzai.

“It takes a confident man to wear a military jacket complete with rows of brass buttons. It’s incredibly chic if it can be pulled off but it’s difficult.”

–Domenico Dolce of Dolce & Gabbana

It seems that military chic is in nowadays, but not that frightfully down-market camouflage type we’re used to seeing on TV. This new variety evokes Napoleon, Barry Lyndon and various other elegant high-ranking officers from eras past. This way, liberal-minded snappy dressers can show they’re thinking about the war, yes, but thinking about it with elegance. No one is interested in bringing to mind on the runway the unpalatable associations of urban combat gear, nor does any fashionable gentleman of the aughts wish to be mistaken for a member of the quickening horde of Iraq and Afghanistan-returned traumatic brain injury cases. In the face of those distasteful harbingers of PTSD doom, camouflage and kevlar, it is now left to the fashionisti to pick up the slack and conjure the image of a gracious military mystique of time past, when a soldier riddled with shrapnel was allowed to die honorably of mortal wounds to his internal organs.

Pondering these questions of fashion so deep and complex, I felt moved to attempt a portrait of one of the most elegant military men of all time, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Father of a nation, extraordinarily natty dresser, and possessor of a most elegant profile, Ataturk is a style icon to which more men ought to aspire. I’d like to see Mssrs. Dolce & Gabbana or the Banana Republican family bring out a fur hat even a fraction as magnificent as that trademark accessory of the first president of the Republic of Turkey. Like Napoleon, Ataturk logged a good many hours on the battlefield, but unlike Napoleon, he was known for more than one fashion look, did not have a complex or a puff pastry named for him, and did not mysteriously keep one hand inside his coat jacket at all times, a look echoed, perhaps, by Michael Jackson’s peculiar little glove in the 80′s.