ink and watercolor
18″x15″
2009
As with “Reading the Morning Mail”, this is a portrait of McKinley Brim. It hangs in my bedroom, where I intend for it to stay, if for no other reason than its being a REJECT.
Just a few months ago, I was contacted by some fancy “art consultant” asking if I had anything for sale and what would be available, etc? Apparently, some (I’m not going to name it) major university has just built a major new medical center…and they want stuff for their walls. I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear that they wanted art which would “reflect Cultural and Racial Diversity” (among other predictable desideratas included in their proposal).
The fact is…I have plenty of David Terry O-riginals in my own house, so I thought “OH! they’ll LOVE ‘Priming the Tobacco’…there’s a nice, readily identifiable black person smack-dab in the middle of it….”
And then, I was told “Oh….that just…won’t work. That’s TOBACCO!”
I suppose I should have thought of that before submitting it for decoration in a cancer ward. Still?….all I could think was that there’s no winning-for-losing in this politically-correct bidness. Bascially, McKinley Brim never made much money off growing tobacco, and I made even less by drawing it.
