“It strikes me, it bothers me. It just bothers me. There’s something very unfair here, there’s something that needs to be corrected. I’m not saying it’s on one side or the other.”
So says artist Ron Van Sweringen, when asked what it was that made him decide to do a series of seven paintings based on the racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown. Painted in an artfully naïve style, the pictures are on display through this month at Lighthouse Art & Framing.
Compositionally sophisticated, the paintings are executed in bright colors that pull the viewer inexorably closer to a story of mayhem, violence, and destruction. With the exception of a couple of white police officers, all of the paintings’ figures represent black Americans. The depiction of blood is omnipresent in these works; in all but one of the paintings the American flag is prominently displayed.
Like most artists, Van Sweringen hopes the public will respond to his work. But what would he like his Vero Beach audience to feel when they view these pictures?
“Empathy for fellow human beings, whoever they are. Feel their pain, understand what they have to go through every day,” Van Sweringen says.
“They’re certainly different from anything I’ve ever done,” he adds.
Most people known Van Sweringen from the splash he made with his art a little over six years ago, shortly after arriving in Vero from Alexandria, VA. The self-taught artist was then in the throes of Astroism, an abstract technique that he developed while painting an Impressionist-style picture. That work did not please him, and in a fit of pique he flung a loaded brush full of paint – several of them, in fact – over the offending imagery. It felt so good that he started throwing paint at blank canvases as well.
Van Sweringen showed his Astroism paintings in his now closed RVS Gallery on 14th Avenue, and in 2011 had a summer show of those works in Orlando’s Menello Museum of American Art, which is dedicated to the collection and exhibition of folk art.
Of late Van Sweringen has returned to the representational style in which he worked before Astroism. For the past year or so the pictures that he has presented on the walls of Lighthouse Art & Framing have been folksy scenes of seaside towns, genteel gardens, the circus, and The Old South.
It is a Van Sweringen circus painting that greets the visitor upon entering the front door of Lighthouse; the gaily colored scene features a circus caravan parked under a blooming Poinciana tree, beyond which the entrance to the big top reveals an acrobatic performance. Nothing could be less likely to prepare you for the pictures in the gallery beyond.
There, the first work that greets the eye is also the largest in the show, a 20 x 24 inch picture titled “Lighting the Arches.” In it, the flames from a McDonald’s restaurant set ablaze by an angry mob leap into the night sky.
The African American figures that populate the scene represent groups of people who came out on the streets for different reasons following the shooting of Michael Brown. A few peaceful protesters stand at right in the picture. With Old Glory fluttering in the breeze above them, they hold up signs that say “R.I.P. Mike” and “Police Kill.” A couple of young men in front of the burning building brandish sticks, while in the center of the composition a group of young people fleeing from the restaurant are stopped in their tracks by the bloody figure of a man lying face down in the street before them.
Arching over the scene is a smoky white streak that enters the right side of the picture and falls with a soft poof in the street at left.
“That is tear gas coming – there’s tear gas in many of the paintings,” says Van Sweringen.
There was not, to Van Sweringen’s knowledge, a McDonald’s set on fire in Ferguson. Nor was Michael Brown shot in front of a McDonald’s.
“This is the way I see it. It might not have been that way at all,” says Van Sweringen, who followed coverage of the unrest on the evening news.
Like Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre (itself a copy of a print by artist Henry Pelham) Van Sweringen’s picture is not an eyewitness account, but a carefully composed dramatization of the event.
Van Sweringen, who lived near the rioting that took place in Washington, DC, after the April 4, 1968, assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, says that his paintings were inspired by Ferguson, but they are not about a specific time or place.
The figure lying in a pool of his own blood in two of the paintings could be “any black person,” Van Sweringen says.
He demands, “How many times have you seen this? It happens over and over and over again.”
Another painting, “The Enforcer,” features the figure of a white policeman wearing riot gear and a gas mask. Standing amidst flames and swirling clouds of tear gas, he holds a bloody baton over his head as panicked people run pell-mell around him.
All of Van Sweringen’s new pictures are just as unpleasant.
“But they’re beautiful. They’re beautiful! The subject matter may be (gory) but they’re still beautiful,” Van Sweringen insists.
Van Sweringen is not speaking of mere attractiveness. In painting these pictures he was after an aesthetic quality that he describes as timeless. After all, Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May” commemorates the bloody firing-squad slaughter of everyday Spaniards at the hands of Napoleon’s troops. In 1808, the painting was a horrifying depiction of fresh events. Today the bloody scene is recognized by art lovers as one of Goya’s most successful works. It is considered beautiful because it transcends a specific event to become a statement about the human condition.
How will Van Sweringen answer those who tell him that a white artist cannot possibly paint a picture sympathetic to the rage felt by many African Americans in Ferguson?
“If I were black, I might understand better where this is coming from, but I don’t,” he says.
“Of course, I’m gay, so I’ve been stepped on all my life,” he adds. “From the time I was 10 years old (he is now 78), I was stepped on for that. And believe me, that’s not a pleasant thing, to be stepped on. Now, I don’t (care). But when I was a kid, I very much did. And so did my family. I have carried my cross. And these people are carrying their cross,” he says.
A jarring note in the gallery is represented by three paintings by Van Sweringen (not part of his new series) of black sharecroppers laboring in cotton fields. The pictures bear a strong resemblance to the work of 19th century artist William Aiken Walker, a white American Southerner who gained recognition in the 1880s for his paintings of black field hands and their families.
Van Sweringen admits that he included the paintings to fill the gallery, and yet, he sees a relationship between the different points of view the pictures present.
“This is what was,” he says, gesturing toward the workers toiling under a hot sun.
“This is where we are now,” he says of the inflamed crowds that surge through his recent work.
