Folk Art Collection at SAAM


Howard Finster. "God is Love. Seek his will and find his peace he saves from sin." After 1970.

There is a wildly entertaining folk art collection at SAAM. It occurred to me seeing this that you can't really go wrong when you write your thoughts and your story on your paintings. I love it. It's deeply interesting to me and truly a people pleaser.

One of my favorite contemporary painters is Stephen Hannock. I don't mean to imply that his remarkable works are like the Finster painting, but one of the qualities I love is that he embeds his personal story into his landscapes in the form of collage and writing. Two of his large landscapes are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I'm fascinated with how I see my landscape differently after seeing the meaning he attributes to his. In a place where you've lived a portion of your life, each corner and every street is rich with memory.

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