Last night the atmosphere couldn’t make up its mind between snow and rain. So the compromise was ice.
Lovely on the plants. Otherwise, a pain in the ass. Literally, if you fall down.
In honor of Abraham Lincoln’s 210th birthday, I assembled my collection of U.S. presidential postcards in one place. It didn’t take long. I only have about two dozen. They come in two classes: those depicting U.S. presidents and those depicting places associated with them.
It’s a limited selection because I haven’t been trying very hard to accumulate them over the years. I have the following presidents on postcards: Jefferson, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Harrison, Hoover, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. But not Lincoln.
I also have one depicting George Mifflin Dallas, 11th Vice President of the United States, who was Polk’s VP. Don’t hear much about him.
Oddly enough, I have more of William Henry Harrison than any other president: three cards dedicated to that briefest of chief executives. Here are two side-by-side cards of Harrison in his days of military glory, around the time of the Battle of Tippecanoe and the Battle of the Thames.
On the left is an 1814 painting by Rembrandt Peale that hangs in Grouseland in Indiana. On the right is an 1813 painting by John Wesley Jarvis, also at Grouseland. I got both cards when we were there for a low price that made me think the museum was getting rid of its stock of postcards, never to replace them.
At some other time I acquired the card on the right, an older Harrison — around the time of his election? Probably, since the flag in the background has 26 stars, which lasted from 1837 to 1845, between the admissions of Michigan and Florida.
An artist named Morris Katz (1932-2010) painted the image of Harrison in 1967. One of a series of presidential portraits that year for Katz, apparently. I have another one of his of Benjamin Harrison, from the same year .
From what I’ve read about Katz, he probably whipped out all of the presidential portraits in a single afternoon. A 1978 article in New York magazine called him “the king of toilet-paper art” and said that he called himself “the world’s fastest painter, creator of instant art.”
“Toilet-paper art”? I wondered exactly what that involved. The article says: “Using only a palette knife and a roll of toilet paper to apply paint, he whips off a landscape oil in under ten minutes…”
This video illustrates his technique. Essentially, Katz used bunched up toilet paper as a kind of sponge to apply the paint. He’s no Rembrandt Peale, but I’ll take him over mutant-eyed Margaret Keane children any day. One of the dentists I visited as a child had her paintings on the wall, or at least paintings in that style, and damned if they weren’t unnerving.