When my father was twelve or so, his mother sewed him an American flag. He had been studying the flag in school (a one-room schoolhouse in rural Michigan in the late 1930s) and he had been talking about making one, drawing it in colored pencils. His mother put together something a little more special, and he remembers taking it in to show his classmates.
Seventy years later, I made a flag. I painted it on an envelope as part of a venue application for Apple Pie and found the experience strangely satisfying. It couldn’t have been the first time I’d made a flag. I must have drawn one in grade school, but I don’t remember doing so. Making the flag my own as an adult was a memorable experience: it helped me make peace with this symbol of our country--a symbol recently claimed by one faction or another and, to my eye, somehow belittled in the process. In fact, the envelope-flag left me wondering if Jasper Johns’ most famous work (his 1954 Flag) wasn’t about something more than my college art history course had led me to believe, and I started to tell everyone I knew that flag-making was a thing worth doing!
My mother (who does the majority of the sewing for my work) was intrigued. I asked her to make me a flag out of canvas scraps so that I might make a painting on it. This is a detail image of the flag she made, stretched but still unprimed.
This intimate family history of the American flag is one of the threads which brought me to the painting Nowa Flaga (pictured in process below). The other thread begins with an encounter with Portland artist Bonnie Meltzer. Bonnie works in mixed media and, often, with fiber, and she’s originally from New Jersey though her father immigrated from Poland.
When I interviewed and photographed her to create her portrait for Apple Pie, we talked a bit about which icon would be a good match for her. She offered to be an inanimate object (!) and we batted around a few ideas, but nothing stuck. I thought Betsy Ross might be a good fit since she’s this country’s most famous seamstress, but, with the exception of being the only woman to have a major part in the story of the Revolution, Betsy is actually quite a disappointment. Miss Ross probably didn’t make the first flag (hers is more of a conveniently assigned role than anything else).
Still Betsy ended up being a good lead. While trying to sort the fact from the fiction of her involvement in the flag’s creation, I came across a lot of information about the various forms our flag has taken over the years, and it hit me that the flag has only been the flag it is now for 48 years! Hawaii joined the union in 1960, bringing the star tally to the fifty we know today.
Suddenly, it made sense to me to show the flag as a living, breathing, changing thing--to give it a face. After all, it isn’t just some stale old symbol thrown together years ago as a standard to carry into battle: it’s a reflection of how this country has grown. While the addition of new stars properly signifies the addition of new states, it’s really a lot more than that. No other country’s flag has stayed basically the same throughout its history while at the same time transforming itself bit by bit over the years. Whatever you may think about American Imperialism and the incorporation of new lands into the United States of America, it remains a powerful thing that our flag can change to more fully represent who this country is.
“Nowa flaga” means “new flag” in Polish. What follows is the making of a Nowa Flaga.
At first, I was a bit unnerved by all the lines embedded in this painting: they seemed solid and impermeable since they were imposed by the material on which I was painting. In this picture, I’m thrilled to have layed out the face in a sensical manner since I wasn’t certain, at first, that I would manage it.
Arguing with myself, vacillating between the modeling of Bonnie’s face…
...and the flag’s colors.
Starting to see the possibility of a happy medium.
Figuring out more what I meant to do in the lower left hand portion.
Getting close to done with the portrait, but not with the painting. I still had all the states’ abbreviations and their dates of entry into the union to add along with a few other details.
Nowa Flaga (Polish-American, Bonnie Meltzer)
2008
acrylic on canvas patchwork flag
48 x 34 inches
detail image of Nowa Flaga
The painting looks like the flag and like Bonnie, something I didn’t think I’d be able to pull off!
detail image of Nowa Flaga
The physical flag on which this portrait is painted is one of a handful of original layouts for the flag, with twelve stars in a circle on the blue field and the thirteenth at the center.
When my father’s mother made him a flag all those years ago, Alaska and Hawaii were not a part of the United States. There were 48 stars in the blue field, arranged in six rows of eight.
Today the stars are in alternating rows of six and five, with four rows of five nestled between five rows of six. This is the flag we’ve had the longest in our history, but not by much. Before Alaska joined in 1959, we had a 48 star flag for 47 years!