John Brosio

Okay, I thought it time to put up one of my straight up tornado paintings. Plus I want to see what it will look like here. We still see the little homestead there at bottom right but the scale is changed. Still, it is very accurate to the size of these monsters. And this painting is much bigger than usual for me. It is 54 × 108 inches and something at the time that I had wanted to attempt for a while already. I’d like to do an even bigger one at some point.

And it is all out of my head after having seen both tornadoes and tornado videos over time. I wanted also to have almost separate experiences for the viewer upon any kind of scrutiny of the surface. There is a relative ton of palette knife work in the illuminated, right hand side of the funnel whereas little more than washes make up the portion in shadow.

And it is called “Unforgiven” for a small culmination of reasons. An artist I had known at the time named Dave Goetz, who was ten years younger than me, died from a combination of angst and the last remaining dash of naivete in his life. He was extremely charismatic and energetic, a sculptor, a welder, and with a dazzling future ahead of him – the kind of individual who was born to lead armies but that the world has grown too small. We were going to work on a project I have still in the works that centers around Virgil’s Aeneid (more on that later maybe) but when he suddenly died the project was put aside. But – our favorite movie was Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and this was the one painting at the time which Dave had seen in its early stages but never got to see finished up. In addition, the circumstances of his death left some, including myself, at first upset and conflicted over his final, fatal conduct. Anyway, you can see how the title starts to add up. Dave had seen to completion every one of the dozen or so paintings I had finished for the show in which this piece was centered but not this one and he had been very excited to check it out.

While no one was looking I placed a note into his coffin, hiding it under his arm. It says, “Call me if you change your mind” and with my current phone number.