“Abraham Lincoln #2, Saguaro Rib, Arizona” © Stu Jenks 2021, 56 inches tall. (Originally "Thomas Hart Benton")
Price: $125, shipping included. Simply contact me via my email address at [email protected] or Facebook message me, if you would like to purchase one of my pieces. Payments can be made with Paypal, Venmo or credit card with Square. All pieces are signed with its title, and can be hung from the wall.
This is a very complicated piece.
Originally this stick was made for Thomas Hart Benton. A painting of his in the North Carolina Museum of Art moves me greatly. (An image capture of that painting is at the bottom of this post.) This 1945 painting is of a family moving from their home before flood waters reach them and their house. A few years ago, that painting was a powerful metaphor for me, because I had to leave my wife and Greensboro to return home to Tucson, in order to work, and make a living. I felt like that man lifting that bed into the wagon.
So. I made Thomas Hart Benton a walking stick. Signed it and everything.
Then I saw Ken Burns' documentary on the man a couple of weeks ago.
Benton was a complete and utter asshole it appears.
He treated everyone badly: wife, students, contemporaries, you name it. He drank way too much. He hated gays and said often how much he disliked the 'limp wrist crowd'. He thought he was the greatest artist who ever lived. He was a bad guy.
Jackson Pollack was one of his students. Benton said of Pollack, "The only thing I taught Jack was how to drink a 1/5 of scotch a day." A day. I know.
I told Alexa about my displeasure with the man. She suggested I burn the stick. I kind of liked that idea. It would burn like a son of a bitch in our fireplace. But I choose a more middle path, sanding off Benton's name and dedicating the stick to someone I actually care about, like Abraham Lincoln.
Old Abe already has a piece made in his honor, a saguaro stick, somewhat heavier from this one. I've been wanting to make Honest Abe another functioning walking stick, something he might have actually used if we had lived at the same time, and he happened to wander into my studio in 19th Century Washington, D.C.
So Mr. Lincoln, you get another stick.
And Thomas Hart Benton? You are shit out of luck. Love your paintings but you can go straight to hell. As you can tell, I feel very strongly about this.
I've said this since I was in art school, said it for decades actually:
You can be a good person and a good artist all at the same time.
The asshole white male artist driven by his creative passions is a cop-out. You, Benton, Picasso, many others, just didn't give a fuck about other people. You were children who just wanted you wanted when you wanted it, wrapping your awful behaviors in artistic rhetoric. It's a rationalization, not a vision statement. Simply, you were dicks. You knew it. I know it. Fuck you.
I've had the opportunity to make sticks for extended family members who were jerks. I've only made one, and that was the Uncle Courtney Saum/Donald Trump stick. If I'm going to spend the hours making lovely pieces, I want to make them only for lovely people. Just the way this artist is built.
Sorry for the lecture. Here enddeth the lesson.
#lincoln, #stujenks, #extendedfamilyseries, #thomashartbenton
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