High Hopes c Kristin Helberg 2009
I created this painting in the summer of 2009 and I took it to Martha's Vineyard that August to put in the art show at the Martha's Vineyard Fair. I was visiting with my sister Kandace who lives on the island. Her grandchildren Andre and Nya were there as well and they helped me create a video to put on YouTube. You can enjoy it at: http://tinyurl.com/Obama-painting-by-Helberg
Edgar Allan Poe c Kristin Helberg 2012
This past February, I decided that I wanted to read everything that I could about Edgar Allan Poe and then attempted to create a portrait worthy of this creative genius. It is believed that like many other artists with inspired vision, such as Vincent Van Gogh, that Poe suffered from right temporal lobe seizure which heightened his creative sensibilities. Unfortunately any amount of alcohol was not a good mix with this chronic condition.
No one truly knows what happened on Poe's stopover in Baltimore on his way to New York, but he was found stripped of his normal elegant clothes, wearing rough working man's apparel and raving mad in a bar in the Fells Point area of the city. Many accounts of the incident believe that Poe had been drugged and perhaps used in a political voting fraud scheme. He died in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849 at the age of 40.
His arch rival Rufis Griswold seized the opportunity to write both a libelous obit and memoir of Edgar Allan Poe accusing him of being a drunken, womanizing madman.
Poe will always be recognized as one our most original American writers and the creator of a new genre of writing known as the detective story. Check out this website to find out more about Poe. www.poemuseum.org
I had the great honor of creating a 3' x 5' commissioned painting for the lobby of the new Mary's Center, that opened in May of 2011 at 3912 Georgia Ave. NW, Washington,DC. My concept for the large canvas was to create a scene that reminds us that we are indeed one big human family, by using the image of a large tree, that unites the figures. I included many nationalities as well as a diverse depiction of ages of men, women and children.
The original Mary's Center was started in a basement in 1988 by Maria Gomez who was working as a nurse at the District of Columbia's Department of Health. Maria witnessed the large increase in the Latin American immigrants coming to the US to escape war, poverty and death. Many of her female patients had been raped and arrived in the United States without prenatal care. With funding from the DC Mayor's office on Latino Affairs and the DC Department of Health, she started her first basement clinic.
Over the years, Maria who is currently the President and CEO of Mary's Center, gradually moved from the basement clinic to larger facilities to provide help to a wider population of the uninsured in Washington, DC. First lady, Michelle Obama, honored Maria Gomez, by making her first DC community visit as the new first lady to Maria's clinic in 2009. Now the new Georgia Avenue center is a Federally qualified Health Center that provides health, social and education to the under-insured and uninsured population of metropolitan Washington.
Visit their website at www.mary'scenter.org for information about donations or volunteer opportunities.
A few days ago, my friend Morag and her darling daughter Lily, went to the National Portrait Gallery to see my portrait of Grandma Moses that is currently on display in their exhibition of recent acquistions. They sent me this great photo of Lily who is a big art fan. My adoring public, sigh.......does it get any better than this?
In May of 2011, my portrait of Grandma Moses was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian as part of their permanent collection. It is currently on display there at the museum in Washington with other recent acquisitions and the show will be up until the end of October 2012.
I was born in upstate New York and my family moved away. But on frequent visits to visit my grandparents, my mother would drive us by the area in Hoosick Falls, NY where Grandma Moses's farm was located with the hopes that we would catch a glimpse of her. We never did, but I admired her greatly. In 1996, I made the portrait of Grandma Moses, working with photographs of her painting in her kitchen studio. I made sure to show the Maxwell coffee cans that she used to hold her paints and her little work table with the painted scenes on either end.
Maryl Robertson Moses, aka, Grandma Moses is a woman we can all admire. She ran her farm, raised her children and did not even begin painting until she was in her 70's creating a career for herself and international acclaim.
If Elvis Presley was still alive, he would be 77 years old. Along with the usual celebration at Graceland, there are special Elvis cruises leaving Florida next week packed with hundreds of Elvis Impersonators.
This painting that I created called Bill and Elvis, is part of the permanent collection at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. Enjoy!
Clint Eastwood is a film director who has created some of the most interesting and thought provoking movies in the past five years, in my estimation. His new bio film of J. Edgar Hoover is further proof of this ability.
I was glad to see him take on the man who held Washington political figures hostage for decades because of the knowledge he had of their private lives. In short, Hoover had created true job security because everyone was afraid to fire him. In 2004, I made a satirical portrait of him, eluding to his rumored transvestite escapades, when he assumed his alternate personality known as "Mary".
I felt it was pay-back time for Mr. Hoover, for all the horrible things he had done to people such as Dr. Martin Luther King and to Melvin Purvis of the FBI who had captured all the famous outlaws, including John Dillinger. J. Edgar Hoover did not like to share the glory and he did not like all the attention Melvin Purvis was receiving for his ability to track down the criminals so he politically undermined him.
For nearly 14 years, I was represented by a gallery in Hilton Head, SC called America Oh Yes which was owned by Joe Adams a famous collector and expert on Southern Folk Art. Joe had also owned the renowned Red Piano Gallery as well.
In 2005, Joe was to appear on a TV show in South Carolina to talk about Southern Folk Art and to show some of the work of the artists he represented. Joe took along my portrait of J. Edgar Hoover and they told him that he could not show the painting on television. So the strong hold that Mr. Hoover had on others existed even in 2005.
I found it interesting to poke fun at a man who lived a secret homosexual life, while cruelly attacking others for trying to do the same. Kudos to you Clint Eastwood.
For the month of October, I was fortunate to be chosen for an artist -in-residency project at the Resurrection-St. Paul School in Ellicott city. The project was jointly funded by the school and the Maryland State Arts Council.
Working with the entire fourth grade, we created a mural which shows the state of Maryland from the western lake district, down through the Cheasapeake Bay and ending at the Atlantic Ocean. The three panels, each measuring 4' x 7', will be installed in the front entry hallway at the school
Painting on the beach panel
Each student drew and painted two or three images on the finished mural. Staff and volunteers had a day when they could add their artistic touches as well. The principal Mrs. Murphy and the Vice Principal, Mrs. Cottrell showed up on staff painting day as well as Monsignor Diezenback and Father Matt. The school will celebrate the mural unveiling on November 7th.
I was thrilled when President Clinton chose my painting “Bill and Elvis” to become part of the permanent collection at his Presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2003. The painting was on display in the rotunda at the capital building in Little Rock as the library was finishing construction but I was unable to attend that event. So when I was informed that my painting would be part of a special show about Elvis at the Clinton Library this past summer, I made my plans to head to Little Rock. I arrived in Little Rock on the afternoon of September lst.
My trip south was very nostalgic for me since I lived in El Dorado, Arkansas from age 4 to age 8 when my father worked for Lion Oil. We would visit Little Rock as our closest big city and memories came back to me as I walked the streets.
The library is an imposing building right on the river in downtown Little Rock. It is all glass so the light and sense of space in the building is wonderful. The permanent exhibits are user friendly and as you walk through them you can follow both Bill and Hillary Clinton from their childhood days right up to the present.
The Elvis exhibit ran from June to September 11, 2011 and contained items of Elvis’s clothing, photos, jewelry, movie posters and even a sports car that he drove in one of his movies. It also had a section featuring Elvis related artwork which was where my painting was shown.
