What is the interpretation thereof? If you buy the painting, or a full-color print on canvas, you can interpret it any way you wish.
When I took this painting to get it professionally photographed at the company that makes my art prints, it generated lots of conversation among the people who work there. When I came to retrieve the painting, some of them wanted to interrogate me. They recognized the rider with the bloodied ear and raised fist as Donald Trump, but they did not know what to think of that, or what to think of all the other details in the painting.
“Does the yellow serpent surrounding the clock have something to do with the brass serpent that Moses made?”
No.
“Do the three sixes at the bottom of the clock have something to do with the 666 Mark of the Beast in Revelation?”
Well, the serpent is a symbol of evil, and the 666 is right above the serpent’s head, so I suppose there is a connection.
“Why is there a mask on Trump’s face? Are you suggesting he is a super-hero, or a hypocrite?”
If you buy it, you can understand it whichever way you prefer.
Here’s the real reason I painted the mask. While painting Trump’s face, I had trouble getting the eyes and nose to look right. I painted and repainted the face several times, but I could not get the eyes and nose to look like Trump’s. Finally I decided to just cover the eyes and nose with an orange mask. Problem solved.
I had been planning to do this painting for quite a few years, but I did not know that Trump would be the rider of Paul Revere’s horse. The idea for the painting came from a line in “Tombstone Blues,” a Bob Dylan song from the 1960s: “The city fathers are trying to endorse / The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse.”
Some of Dylan’s lyrics do not make much sense, but they provide ideas for interesting artwork. I planned to place Paul Revere’s horse at the 12 o’clock position, based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Then I planned to show the horse gradually deteriorating into a pile of bones at the 6 o’clock position, then gradually being reconstituted.
Last summer I bought a 48” x 48” canvas and started looking online to find a photo of a horse and rider that I could use for a model. I was frustrated, because I could not find a pose that I liked. Then Trump was shot in the ear. I looked at the news, and lo, I beheld a photo of Trump standing with his bloodied ear, his fist raised in the air beside the American flag, and I knew I had the perfect pose for the rider of Paul Revere’s horse.
Some of the details in the painting are derived from Longfellow’s poem. There are lanterns in the church belfry, “one if by land, two if by sea.” I borrowed the church building from Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Longfellow’s poem mentions graves in the church yard, so I added some blue tombstones by Van Gogh’s church. Longfellow’s rider was “booted and spurred,” so I shod the rider with spurred boots. Paul Revere arrived in Lexington at 1 a.m. and in Concord at 2 a.m., so I put the city signs at those positions. There was a “gilded weathercock” in Lexington, which I included there.
I put a tricornered MAGA hat on the rider, then decided to put MAGA on the horse’s forehead as well. A Trump-hating Facebook Buddy of mine posted a photo of a red MAGA hat, accompanied by some text that suggested that wearing MAGA on the forehead is taking the Mark of the Beast. Since the Bible speaks of the Mark of the Beast being not only on the forehead but also on the right hand, I added a MAGA bracelet on the horse’s right hoof. That in turn gave me the idea to add two additional sixes at the bottom of the clock, connecting 666 with the serpent below the VI VI VI, and with the bones of Paul Revere’s dead horse, Brown Beauty, whose blue tombstone is positioned in Tombstone, Arizona.
And as Paul Harvey used to say, That, my friends, is the rest of the story!
Prints on 32” x 32” stretched canvas available, $350 plus shipping.
See more of Daniel Botkin's Dylan-themed artwork in his book: https://www.lulu.com/.../hardcover/product-45qjwn2.html
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