Jon Serl

According to Jon Serl, this painting began one afternoon with the drawing of a neighborhood boy who interrupted Serl's painting. Serl told the boy to retrieve a piece of scrap board and work on his own creation, instructing him to "put the head all the way at the top and put the feet at the bottom." When he saw the initial drawing, Serl was inspired to work on it himself, to "make it live." The result is a composition characteristic of Serl's art that interweaves daily realities with his profoundly subjective view of contemporary life.

As a child, Serl performed in his family's traveling vaudeville show, and this experience provided an essential element of his mature painting style. When Serl began painting inearnest after World War II, his earliest compositions were landscapes. By the mid to late 1950s, Serl's vision had turned toward expressionist figurative studies that continue to command his attention. His portrayals of human interaction are usually stagelike, achieving their mysterious qualities by a masterful use of color. "You don't see my paintings," Serl insists, "you feel them."

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)