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Monday, January 21, 2008

King's Symbolism Stripped To Reveal His Humanity

MLK - (i) inspired by photo owned by Pan-African News Wire Photo FileIn going through my albums to get organized this past week, I found this record of Martin Luther King Jr. speech excerpts. After digging up this beautiful photo, I decided to paint it. I can pay hommage and celebrate anybody who has a recording on vinyl, after all. "I Have a Dream" is on side 2, so it's still somewhat playable. However, a reason I paint some of these portraits the way I do is to show the person as a human being, trying to capture their soul and the spirit of their Life. As this article discusses, too often iconic figures in history become reduced to a single moment, like with King's famous speech. I hope my paintings generally counterract the flattening of culturally important people, both visually and substantively.

I'd like to know what you think! How do you think my paintings characterize their subject? There are a good number of examples here on my blog, and you can also:

CHECK OUT MY WEBSITE AT: http://www.vinylart.info/

and look through the online gallery. Do my paintings celebrate their lives and contributions to our culture?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is beautiful. It may be my fave so far.

As a music fanatic, I'm into your work in general. But this piece reminds me how much importance we place on our music 'heroes' while so many truly heroic individuals get pushed into the background.

A very powerful picture, Daniel.

Looking forward to more great stuff!

Daniel Edlen said...

Thanks! I appreciate the comment. I'm planning on doing one of JFK too (found a bunch of records I didn't know I had, :)).