“Hope is a Mother Bird Teaching Us How to Fly,” Jerome Stueart, (11 x 15) Watercolor, mixed media on paper.
Relaunching this after putting some words across the bird for clarity. I forget that political cartoons sometimes need words… sometimes. Better without them, perhaps, but in this case, better with.
Bernie Sanders launched rallies across swing states and red states. They are attracting thousands of people in each spot. His goal: teaching us how to handle this current fight, and how to fight back. He is listening to how folks are hurting from the poor decisions made by the Trump administration and their decimation of the structures that support people across America. You can hear some of this in his new video on Instagram.
Sanders is also teaching folks how to not lose hope. I remember his 2016 moment when the bird flew to his podium and was dubbed thereafter as Birdie. It was a sign of Hope. I have imagined that Birdie is back — much larger, and able to instruct a whole flock of people how to fly.
He’s one of many keeping people informed and giving power back to the people.I find myself also listening to AOC, Pete Buttigieg, Chris Murphy, Jasmine Crocket, Sarah McBride, and others tell us what is happening in our government behind the scenes, and how we can fight back.
These people representing us in Congress inspire me. Add them to the political activists outside of Congress and I have feelings of hope.
Hope is not dead. It just needs US to learn to fly.
“Hope is a Mother Bird,” Jerome Stueart, (11x 15) watercolor, mixed media on paper.
When I saw that Sen. Bernie Sanders was going to go back into rally mode, and go across the nation, teaching people how to fight oligarchy, I was filled with hope. I’ve also been watching Rep. AOC give instructions and insight over instagram, Youtube, and other social media. Reps Chris Murphy, Jasmine Crocket, have also been trying to help people make sense of what’s happening and give us a game plan of what to do. I hear Pete Buttigieg is possibly going to give weekly talks about what Democrats are doing right now.
All of this is to HELP US—because we are the power in this situation, but we don’t know our powers. We need help to find out HOW to make our voices heard even as votes are happening to take those powers away.
Fight oligarchy. Call your representatives. Join rallies. Educate yourself through these people and other organizations. We can be taught how to fight back. It’s not too late.
This bird–the same bird that flew onto Bernie’s podium in 2016–it’s back. It’s bigger. It’s ready to fight. It is HOPE and HOPE FIGHTS.
This bird in the painting felt so much like it was sitting on a nest– parenting us, helping us hatch. The people, for a moment, when I was sketching, looked like a whole mass of eggs. We are being educated, taught how to fight, and reminded of the powers that we have.
“Tough Love for Billionaires, or Have We Got an Asteroid for You!” (11 x 15) watercolor, mixed media on paper.
Do we need names on these dinosaurs or can you imagine who they are?
I know the real asteroid in the news has been downgraded from being a concern for Earth, and that’s …WHEW! However, when it comes to metaphorical asteroids, I think we’ve seen how effective our collective action can be. More of us than them. Perhaps Friday will get the attention of a few dinosaurs.
I hope you take a moment to shop only local and small on Feb 28th and not give money to big box stores–really those stores that supported Trump or pulled back their DEI initiatives.
We think we can only affect change through voting, but that restricts us to such few opportunities over several years.
We can make changes through withholding our money. And this affects billionaires and CEOs the most.
Join me on Feb 28 for the Big Economic Blackout and then several others that are planned.
This is a different kind of march, a different kind of protest.
Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, and others need to feel your power too.
Join me this Friday, FEB 28th.
Note: I just cut a blue square out of some paper and it sat there on the painting when I made the photo–so it’s not painted on there. This is why Jerome must learn Photoshop and digital editing.
“Consider the Half-Life of Roses,” Jerome Stueart, (11 x 15) watercolor, watercolor pencil, mixed media on paper.
A satyr in a painting stops his play to smell the roses again before they are gone. My mother keeps dried roses in the kitchen window, and I know they still hold a beautiful smell. So much of the rose lingers after the rose dies. Roses have a long, long half-life. They don’t have to stay beautiful to hold a room spellbound. They give joy long after they can hold their blooms up, or keep their petals on. Old Roses are the most underestimated, and therefore give the most joy when we stop for a moment and smell them. “Oh, it’s still there.” Proving that their influence lasts so much longer than their lives. For years and years and years to come.
Hope you take time this week to enjoy everything around you.
Illustration, “Fantasy on the Art of the Deal of the Steal,” (11 x 15) watercolor, pen and ink on paper.
Apparently the internet is exploding with election fraud conspiracy theories from the Left. “‘By 8am ET, the number of posts per hour had surged to 31,991,” PeakMetrics wrote in an analysis shared with WIRED.” (WiRED, Nov 6, 2024)
Who’d have thought, huh?
I guess folks would rather blame a convicted felon, serial liar, racist misogynist, and his billionaire sidekick, owner of a vast media empire freely used to spread misinformation, citing their association with Russian hackers — than, you know, turn and blame each other for this election loss.
I can understand that sentiment. People are in pain. We want to find reasons. We want to still believe in the unity we witnessed during the campaign–that it is NOT an illusion. We don’t want to believe it might not be as effective or as widespread as we thought. So there must be another illusion out there…. we think.
Too bad that questioning election results has been a rallying cry of the far-right for so long that we made an oath of office accepting the election returns no matter what. Too bad for voters that election results denial is associated with a lack of trust in democracy, associated with believing in ancient aliens, or lone gunmen, or other conspiracy theories that have no evidence, and just not acceptable to right-minded people. Too bad that even the hint of the question may give the far-right more ammo in their distrust of government.
And nobody wants to do that. So we must tread carefully when understanding where we are.
But blaming each other for Trump’s win, or stigmatizing marginalized groups of voters, or criticizing Harris or Biden or Democrats in general is not the answer either. I’ve been seeing too much of that lately and it’s ripping the Left to pieces; it’s destroying the coalition of joy and those wanting to create a better society from within. Yes, society must change to be better for everyone. We have to build that, but we need each other intact, not bloody on the election floor.
We already built a strong coalition. I saw that. You saw that. We have to maintain that coalition. I saw the future I’d hoped for being created across America these last few months. I still believe it’s there. It was YOU. You were building that. It still exists.
Keep being kind to each other in these uncertain times. We need each other. We can’t let ourselves be divided even more.
I only hope that one day neither party ever figures out how to hack those machines (like they hack banks and credit card companies so easily) because, in our pride, in our sanctimonious belief that we are impervious to being fooled and our machines are hack-proof, and that we aren’t the kinds of people who believe in conspiracies, we won’t be able to allow any Dorothy to pull that curtain back.
“The Bliss before the Ruckus,” Jerome Stueart, artist, 11 x 15, watercolor, pen and ink on cold press watercolor paper. 300
STAY IN THE BLISS as long as you can.
Some things you just have to do— even if you know the next moment is going to be chaos. Even if the thing you want to do is going to CAUSE that chaos. That could be a little fun….
What happens next in this picture may not be as important as what is being experienced RIGHT NOW that makes the chaos worth it.
In “The Bliss Before the Ruckus”, we see a dog mid-jump to a big comfy bed where a cat is asleep—and here’s that one beautiful moment when they are flying, the sun hitting their face, the wind in their fur, and they know a soft landing, some bounce, and a pleasurable sleep on the bed is theirs!
Take a chance today. Try something you haven’t tried before. Be risky, but smart.
I have put my available original artwork on Squarespace. All my watercolors of fairies in the garden, Gardens of the Mythbegotten, and all the Yukon Cornelius paintings as well as my more controversial paintings of police action in Columbus.
Me geeking out at the NC Wyeth Exhibit at Brandywine Museum in Chadd’s Ford, PA.
I have been a big admirer of the works of NC Wyeth for a long time. You might remember his illustrations from your favorite classic YA adventure novels (now assigned texts in college 19th Century and turn of the century literature classes), books like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Last of the Mohicans, A Boy’s King Arthur, Kidnapped, The Yearling, Robin Hood, The Deerslayer, etc. Very popular books in the early 20th Century with themes and storylines still made into movies today.
I loved his style! BIG color, lots of drama, action, adventure, stunning landscapes. I wished I could paint like that ever since I saw my first Wyeth up close at Texas Tech University. But I was a cartoonist at the time, and an occasional portrait artist, and I was working towards a PhD in Creative Writing. I wasn’t thinking of myself as an Artist, nor was I think of myself as an Artist who was going to study Wyeth.
As a gay man, growing up so Other from other boys, I had a peculiar relationship with the World of Boys and Men (which I will write about more in a later post) and that was a world that belonged to Wyeth as well. I had felt excluded for a long time from that world, and made up for it by being in other worlds. But I lingered outside the borders often and looked in at Things Which Were Not For Me.
So I pursued writing and teaching as a career, making art wait.
But in the last few years, my teaching situation changed, and it was difficult to find work as an adjunct teacher. I also continued to almost make it in the job market for tenure track positions. So i decided to make a change in my life–to build my art career–because I needed the money, a new source of income, and my art had waited long enough.
The Columbus College of Art and Design have accepted me into their MFA program, and my curriculum is all about Illustration (digital and traditional). I start in the fall. They have also offered me a chance to teach the History of Comic Narrative as an adjunct course while I’m in grad school and I said yes! So I’m very happy to be moving to Columbus for a couple of years, exploring my painting, my drawing and illustration. I’m hoping to acquire more skills to use for jobs—in illustration or portraiture–but also to illustrate my own works.
The program is two years long, is project based: you propose three projects, one a semester, and then one that covers a whole year. They have strong ties to industries that support artists: Disney, Wizards of the Coast, Hallmark, etc. I’m very excited about the chance to improve my art skills over the next two years.
The hard part is that it will go SO FAST. I plan on learning all I can. I have five or six projects in mind–most of them connected to a writing project. I have to narrow them down! LOL.
I won’t stop writing and, hopefully, publishing, but instead of full time teaching, this allows me to survive for a couple more years, learning skills as I go, and allowing me to get more writing done. My goal is still to emerge in two years with more skills, more publications, ready to take on any jobs that I can get.
Bear Witness 