Nighttime 3326– 

The inspiration for this painting started off with a quote from Hocus Pocus, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “ We have the misfortune of knowing what’s really going on, And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball.” It also started with the silhouette of a dead figure and a pine tree emerging from his center. Life fertilizer, his body provides nourishment for the tree. Inside the silhouette are printed collage ghost-like figures. More hand-printed smaller trees and hand-colored relief printed characters are dotted throughout the forest surroundings. Back in Pennsylvania we were hit with in invasion of white company pickup trucks all too familiar to those found here in south Louisiana. They're after the dead tree and the ghosts that it left behind.  Bright orange abstract brush strokes act as lines of force embedded with more relief printed figures with bags over their heads and hands in the air, useless to care anything about it all.  

-Jeremiah Johnson