Liberty, equality, and homeland security.
From the very beginning, I knew that one of the portraits in my series about what it means to be American would have to touch on the Mayflower. As a kid, I was always struck by the way our national creation myth was presented to us every November, rife with historical errors and adorned with funny rituals involving a handful of white kids wearing feathered headbands made out of construction paper. I wanted this utterly American experience to be represented in Apple Pie, so I asked Dino, an immigrant from Bosnia, how he would feel about being a modern day Pilgrim—and, specifically, one with a green card!
The term “pilgrim” is usually reserved for a person journeying to a holy or historically significant place. That we call the first immigrants to this country capital “P” Pilgrims (even though most of them were Puritans who called themselves Separatists) must mean something, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on just what.
As with this painting also from Apple Pie, I was unnerved by the expanse of non-portrait that I had planned for the composition of Pilgrim, so I started where I was most comfortable, with the face.
Then, the disposable thumb incident happened, and I was relegated to pushing around puddles of paint on several canvases at once since I could not manipulate a brush to do any detailed work.
My out-of-commission thumb gave me the excuse to layer the background a bit, but, at some point, I knew I would have to dive into the composition, even the parts that intimidated me.
As it turns out, this is another thing you can do when your thumb is disabled (there’s a bandaid under all that paint). I discovered that the low quality paints used by grade schools across the United States are actually more suited to handprint turkeys than Golden brand acrylics—either that or I’ve simply lost the turkey touch. The handprint fowl was essential to this piece. It replaces the fingerprint that immigrants provide on their green cards.
photo by David
By the time my thumb had healed enough for me to put pressure on it again, I was very ready to trade in hours of spontaneous drip work for the more demanding detail work. Spontaneity is difficult to sustain over a few days (especially since I was looking for the same kind of spontaneity that whole time).
Painting this portrait involved me asking myself “now what?” a lot. Everything was new: how to make a painting of an official document interesting? How to make text that was legible but not distracting? How to paint a pumpkin?
Neurotic as I am, I agonized over what number to use on my version of a green card. I wanted the identification number to have a meaning, even if no one would ever know what that meaning was. I finally settled on translating two words into numbers.
And, with the rest of the space, I wanted to include all the funny details I remembered from the turkey-themed days of grade school Novembers. The dead fish and pumpkins that the Pilgrims planted amongst the corn on the advice of the Native Americans were a must.
To help activate the rest of the non-face space in the painting, I looked again at the images of green cards that I could find online (and there aren’t many since the government tends to be cagey about providing frauds with how-to kits for forging official documents). The cards are really fairly plain—my version was already far more elaborate at this point—but there was one detail that I had originally axed: the faux watermark seal behind the text on the card. When I started to look more closely at this aspect of the card, I noticed something a little funny.
The United States Department of Justice used to be in charge of immigration through its sub-department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and it was the Department’s seal that appeared on green cards originally.
After September 11th, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was created to manage threats to national security and respond to natural disasters in US territory. The new Department took over immigration and customs enforcement along with the rest of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s duties. It’s the Homeland Security seal which appears on green cards now. I decided that a combination of these seals represented what I meant to say with this painting.
It was at this stage in my work that I suddenly noticed my cultural insensitivity. I had made Dino’s country of origin Croatia instead of Bosnia. Brilliant. At least I caught it before exhibiting the painting…!
Gwenn Seemel
Ellis Island Pilgrim (Bosnian-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches
detail image of Ellis Island Pilgrim
Dino’s very modern glasses were important to present-meets-past-meets-myth aspect of this painting.
detail image of Ellis Island Pilgrim
And I changed the eagle in the faux watermark seal to a turkey to more fully honor the Pilgrims’ experience of the United States.
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CATEGORIES: - Process images - Philosophy - Apple Pie -
Pamella Settlegoode, Ph.D....
Gween has been very productive since I last met and viewed her work. Her art persists and it’s a good thing. Art is significant and should be publicly supported.
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