This large oil painting was done on a Masonite panel with my 52.5 inch square carved and painted frame. Joy and sorrow are universal emotions, especially in youth. This is my ‘tribute to youth’. Here is a remarkable story of its inspiration with more photos of these kids and details of the whole piece.

The vision for this came in a flash when I was driving in a ‘white out’ of fog and snow. I was returning from a workshop with my mentor, master-artist George Carlson at the Scottsdale Artist’s School. The interstate had ok visibility until in a few seconds it became a complete white out!

As I slowed down, immediately a car almost ran into the back of mine. So I sped up and focused on the right front bumper of my white car to follow the white line on the edge of the pavement. During this intense gaze the whole image for the painting appeared in my mind’s eye. 

Soon that white line I had been following veered off to the right and I figured it was an off-ramp so I took it. This was in southern Utah in the middle of ‘no-where’, but I lucked into a small, lone gas station and café. Just like in the movies, I sketched the image for the painting on a napkin while having coffee, since I had rushed through the storm without any paper.

Back while I had been driving in the white out I was entertaining myself by recalling something that another artist, Isa Barnett, had said to me at that workshop. We had been talking about the Lascaux Cave of France that ancient humans had decorated with animal art almost 20,000 years ago. I mentioned that “mankind has been making ART before we ever had a written language”.

Isa’s response was surprising.  He said, “You know, the artists who painted the images in the cave may have signed their work, because at the very back are human handprints, which may have been their ‘autograph’. Then Isa said, “You know, no two finger prints are alike, but tears around the world taste the same”. I felt compelled to include Isa’s remark about the finger prints and tears, so I had it engraved on brass strips that are screwed into the panel in the upper left of the painting.

I thought about kids who shed a lot of tears, and how kids of every kind are equal with this common denominator.

For the next year I spent finding 6 students at our local schools, who ranged in age from 11 to16, and who agreed to participate in my project. I offered to - either pay them, or give them a charcoal portrait that I would sketch of them, after I finished with it, using it as a model for the big painting. (They all chose to receive the sketch). 

After doing all the sketches, getting to know each young person, I got them all together for a photo-shoot where they did various poses in groupings, the results of which I also used to create the final composition for the painting in the same design that I had sketched on the napkin a year earlier.

Finally when the kid’s images were finished on the painting, I called them all into the studio and had them ‘autograph’ the bottom with their own hand prints in oil paint, in the same order as they appear in the painting above. 

The carved frame has marks and gouges all over it that represent the wounds that have been inflicted by prejudice and racism. But I tried to soften those effects by using a creamy yellow paint overall on the frame. Please read my additional POST SCRIPT below this detail of the handprints and frame.

POST SCRIPT: When this painting has been shown in a variety of public places it evokes wild extremes of emotions from people. Some are so emotional that they are disturbed by the pain of the sorrow component. Others find it very uplifting and joyful!

I did this painting in 1990, but I believe it is just as relevant and poignant for today. It is still in my own collection, but I would very much like to place it in a museum for multitudes of people to observe and contemplate. –G.P.L.