According to the curators and directors of the Tenderloin Museum, a certain person who has devoted years of his life to documenting San Francisco’s central city and Tenderloin simply does not exist. I hope you will pardon my lack of enthusiasm over the museum’s opening today. Ignored if not outright rejected by the neighborhood into which I have poured all my love, I am right now feeling angry and crushed. Considering all I have endured and ultimately overcome in this life, I will most likely get over it . . . some day.
UPDATE (18 July 2015): I am over it. The work at hand is far more important to me.
“St. Boniface Spire” (2014)
Another example of a prophet being without honour in his own country. It is equally bad here; our good singers, actors, poets, all have to go elsewhere (US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France) to find acceptance of their work and earn a living by it. For Blacks in all N America it is far worse. AND that doesn’t make what happened to you any more acceptable! It is shoddy politics at their worst. Too much affluent white men (and perhaps some women make it in the doors now) making sure no one but them get through their doors or arches of triumph.
Your photo looks Hopperesque; splendid atmosphere in it! Edward’s ghost must surely be with you.
Thank you for the Hopper comparison, Helen. He has been one of my favorite painters ever since childhood, when I discovered him in a book about American artists. I don’t recall the book’s title, but it was the only “art book” in my parents’ meager library. Why they had it I’ll never understand, for they never referred to it or, as far as I know, even read it. In its pages I discovered works by Hopper, Reynolds, Homer, Wyeth and many others. The paintings of Edward Hopper captured my six-year-old imagination by storm.
Lucky you! I never saw anything of his until I was in my 20s. I now have a tiny book with quite a few colour reproductions of his paintings. I like his architectural ones best; they are quite abstract in how he handles the composition, arranges the space like a stage set. You do that, too, even if you cannotmove things about as a painter can; the effect is equally strong.