Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 43-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Not sure how Whistler’s Mother ended up on the wall here, but it’s one of the paintings David and I have looked very closely at in our weekly Art Talk series of landline conversations. Turns out that Whistler was something of a pro-abstract-painting radical, but Whistler’s Mother somehow worked its way into a different lexicon.
Ironically, Whistler’s Mother has come to represent traditional values. Along with American Gothic, the painting of the older couple and a pitchfork, the idea seems to be that the viewer is expected to accept that the subjects’ supposed virtues are beyond reproach. Those who don’t stand with them are against them. Or maybe I’m extrapolating too much here, but Whistler’s mother and the older couple don’t look like they’d be into debating various social behaviors. It’s likely their way or the highway, which these days means deportation, detention camps or death.
“Lois Wrote About The Farm” is about a demographic that we would now call MAGA. It’s tempting to assert that Whistler would have found such sentiments abhorrent, but it appears to be difficult (based on what’s known) to pin his beliefs to modern-day left-vs.-right politics.
“Lois Wrote About The Farm” from Water Cuts My Hands (K, 1991) (download):
