24" x 48" oil on masonite ; NOTES ON NEW PROJECT Painting 1 : Blind Willie Johnson: He was born in Brenham Texas, was blinded as a small child when his stepmother, in a fit of rage threw lye in his face, seeking revenge on his father, who beat her when he found her with another man. Most of his stuff is about God and death. He was very religious, he almost barked instead of cried and his hands were those curvy kind, the ones where the second joint in his thumbs sticks out at a sharp angle. Although he made many recordings and wrote such incredibly beautiful songs as "In My Time of Dying" and "The Soul of a Man", he died completely impoverished earning his meager living as a street musician in Texas. The word is pneumonia, contracted from sleeping for months on a wet mattress after his house burned down. The hospital reportedly refused to admit him for treatment. He lies in an unmarked grave; no-one knows where he is buried. But heres the best part: When NASA sent up the Voyager shuttle (1977), a spacecraft which would float indefinitely through space with the hopes of contacting alien life-forms, they included the golden record, a disc filled with basically the sights and sounds of planet earth. Among the extremely few sound recordings which included whale calls and the first movement of Beethovens 5th, was Blind Willie Johnsons "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground". Not bad for a penniless blind and homeless son of a sharecropper. "The stars above the barren trees was his only audience" - to risk contradicting the almighty Bob within his own universe, I really felt that to me, this applied more to Blind Willie Johnson than Blind Willie McTell.