WAITING FOR MY BOY
Giclee (pastel)
2004
8" X 11"
edition 400

In my teens, I discovered works by American artists who were brave enough to see black people as worthy of painting or preserving in drawings, paintings, and photographs; Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Romare Bearden, Eudora Welty , and on and on. From those quiet, rural days of absorbing images by these masters, I would later reflect on my own life experience and the sights I had seen on a neighbor uncle’s cotton farm. It was the 1960’s and much on that and other farms would suggest little change from Miss Welty’s photos from decades earlier. This pastel of my friend, Miss Gertrude, made me think of those days and yet felt strangely appropriate to my study for the Civil War monument. How many mothers, black and white, never saw their boys come home?