The Brian Williams Factbook

Brian Williams probably didn't see dead bodies lying in the street during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s clear that he didn’t come under small arms enemy fire in a Chinook helicopter in 2003. Nor did Hillary Clinton land under sniper fire in the Balkins or Tom Harkin fly combat missions in Vietnam.

There’s the institutional blindness of Rotherham Borough in ignoring the grooming, drugging and rape of at least 1400 mostly underage, predominantly white girls by local Pakistani Kashmiri Muslims. 

Last week on Facebook I ‘learned’ that one in five children will develop cancer from eating GMO foods, and that “every day Christians kill a transgendered person.” And then there’s our President (a graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law) drawing crude and illogical parallels between the Crusades and ISIS.

These people aren't really lying. They're twisting and spinning information. They sacrifice inconvenient facts to their bigger truth. In this systematic destruction of small truths lies a Great Truth about our times: facts are subservient to narrative, and it’s no longer a big deal to lie.

The drawings on this post were done by J—, who grew up in a cult which perfected the use of media in manipulating the public. No less a personage than Oprah was taken in by them. Yes, the truth ultimately came out, but at great expense to many. While the public was still sorting out what was true (mainly through the efforts of the Texas court system), more people suffered.

One of the bitter fruits of gaslighting (as that truth-twisting is called) is that it’s hard for its victims to understand what is true and what is false. Imagine that every time you pick up a pencil your past kicks in to question you. When J— asks, “What should I draw? I don’t know what to draw,” it is not that he’s not creative; it’s his history trying to shut him up.

All this public and private lying makes me feel so old. Even though my parents were bohemian by the standards of their day (no church, no scouting) we did have the advantage of a stiff whipping if we were caught bending the truth. (Oddly enough, that didn’t impair our creativity.)

Today truthiness is preferable to truth in our culture. That’s why our mass media is a cesspool of simulated sex. It’s why the coy, sexualized nude done by a middle age man gets enthusiastic exhibit space, but paintings about misogyny are closed down. That’s how we can call 50 Shades of Grey a romantic movie, instead of a glorification of abuse. We can deal with shallow illusions, but we hate hard truths. They might require us to do something.

What are we—as artists—to do about it? In a culture suffused with lies, we must continue to tell the truth, and we should demand the truth from our students. To me, this points to realism as the most radical style of art for our age. Can you really tell the story of abuse, beauty, misogyny, love, war, or peace if the details are fuzzy?

Truth is frequently controversial. Controversy, paradoxically, is often not truthful. Truth is sometimes happy, but it’s never twee. Truth is often unpopular until long after the truth-teller has left. For this reason, it makes sense to leaven the bitter with the palatable, unless you like serving coffee for a living.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

Feminist design, for real.

An outdoor toilet block in an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. No lights, no doors and a pit toilet. (Photo courtesy of Douglas J. Perot)

My friends have gotten a mighty good laugh at Bic’s totally pointless For Her ballpoint pens. But if you think all work of interior and industrial designers is trivial, then consider this story from Delhi, which tells us there is a link between the lack of proper bathrooms and sexual crimes against women.

Women in the Bhalswa neighborhood have the choice of paying a rupee to use a toilet in a communal toilet block, which is one of two serving a thousand households in their neighborhood. When it isn’t open—which is frequently—they are reduced to squatting in a nearby field.

The interior of a pit toilet in an orphanage in Port-au-Prince. Although there are no doors, the orphanage is secured and girls are safe when using it. This is not the case elsewhere in Haiti or many other parts of the world. (Photo courtesy of Douglas J. Perot.)

In either case, the danger of molestation is high. Neighbors estimate the rate of abduction from the toilet blocks to be about one a month, and women using the field are frequently harassed or assaulted by men.

More than half of India’s households don’t have sanitary facilities, and for the lowest-caste Dalits, that percentage is far higher. More Indians have cell phones than toilets. Considering how cheap cell phones are and how expensive bathrooms are, that’s really no surprise.  

Occasionally plein air painters end up in a situation where they have to relieve themselves outdoors. Any woman who’s done this has a small sense of the vulnerability of the third-world woman without a bathroom.

Sanitary water and sewer lines have enhanced the development of private bathrooms but did not create them. Before there was running water in homes, there was the garderobe, which was a pit toilet that emptied outside the house. 

When we think of “bathroom design” in America today, we think of clever storage, heated towel bars, and granite tiles. But these are very recent innovations. My house was built with one family bathroom containing a tub, commode and pedestal sink, and a half-bath on the ground floor. The doors on both rooms were designed to lock, and the walls were covered with ceramic tile to facilitate cleaning. That was pretty much state-of-the-art in 1928.

A Toto Washlet and its remote control.

Now there is the strange (to our eyes) toilet of Japan, the Toto Washlet and its variations, which are available in 72% of Japanese households. These toilet seats incorporate posterior washing, feminine washing, seat warming and deodorization. Some models raise and lower the seat automatically.

Modern bathrooms did not spring fully-formed from a scientist’s brain. They were created iteratively, starting from the humble outhouse and working forward. Most 20^th century improvements were made by industrial designers at the factory level and interior designers at the consumer level, and the quick-and-easy solution that brings universal sanitary facilities to the third world will probably come about in a similar way.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!